I recently took my Prius to Toyota for an oil change. As a courtesy, they come tell you if any filters need changing. This comes at a price, of course. $35 for the air filter and $45 for the cabin filter. Do not allow Toyota to change these for you. You can easily change them yourself and save $50. I simply stopped at a local auto parts store and bought the parts myself for $35, went home and youtubed a video on how to change each. It took me less time to change BOTH filters than I was actually in the store buying them. Here are the links. Cabin Filter Air Filter
I once had the dealer call me claiming that the cabin filter needed replacement for a filter that was 12 HOURS old. Now they are told to change the oil and rotate the tires. Nothing more.
i have another vehicle i get serviced somewhere else and as i was walking thru the parking lot, i noticed a woman crawling around on the ground looking under her car. after a few minutes she came inside and began to make a rukus about how her tires were not rotated. could have been an oversight but she mentioned the fact that she marks her tires for that reason. not a bad idea.
With the reused canister I don't think that's going to work, unfortunately. Unless the old oil was really clean, pretty easy to tell from appearance on the dipstick.
Why worry about being discreet ? Take a crayon and mark them LF, RF, LR, RR. I once had a service advisor argue with me even after I did that. He said "How do we know how you marked them before you came in ?" Then he went and looked. The rotation was done in about 10 minutes. His boss came out and apologized.
It's so hard to find a good mechanic that doesn't take short cuts anymore. If the compensation for mechanics were different, the customers would get better work done. Since they are paid on the volume of work they do, the faster they get through the jobs, the more money they can earn. It's kinda sad.
