Another day, another little thing. The rubber-ish cover on the hatch release button on the 09 has become a gooey mess. I had a look on eBay and found some replacements but am wondering about how good they are. What is up with these terrible soft compounds for parts like this? That deterioration should have been well known and whomever specified such a material for that part should've known better. Or perhaps that property is why it was chosen. A person on another forum admitted working for Ford on the design of dash parts and how they carefully chose the TPU overmold material to not be too durable so it'd eventually go bad, peel off and look terrible.
I finally got sick and tired of playing five minute finger pool with mine, so I replaced the melted cover with a new one, yesterday. A $9 kit with the cover and all tools needed to remove it and scrape the melted mess off can be had on Amazon. I watched a two minute video on YouTube to see what to remove and it took me about twenty minutes, most of the time taking to remove the goo.
Hmmm. Don't know if some buttons were made with different rubber material, or if exposure to sunlight or certain chemicals is causing this. The buttons on my 06 are still fine. Nice to know that reasonable replacements are available. Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.
The button was fine and in excellent working order, once I removed the melted rubber like cover. The rubber had degraded so much that it had to be scraped out of all the nooks and crannies of the button. I could have replaced the whole button but after a thorough cleaning of the melted rubber I found it worked fine. The cause of this is probably the specific formulation of the rubber like material that allows the plasticizer to migrate to the surface and start dissolving the whole block of material. Toyota had a similar problem with their 2007 era dashboards that they eventually replaced for free.
Yes, replaced. The $9 kit comes with the rubber piece, scraper, new screws and even an angled Phillips screw driver. The scraper was just the right size to get into all of the crevices that the goo migrated into. The OEM switch looks like it’s pretty high quality and it now works fine.
