I don't know what idiot designed the oil check dipstick but I can't get a consistent reading to save my life. My car is older and goes through oil pretty quickly now, and the damn stick gives me a totally inconsistent reading every time. One side today showed 1/4 left, and the other side showed 3/4. I dip it multiple times, same thing. Is there ANYTHING I can do to get an accurate reading? I'm so over this.
Park it on a completely flat surface and read it after it has been off overnight. That both eliminates tilt issues and lets any oil that splashed up the tube while being driven drain back down. Pulling it out, wiping it, putting it back in, and reading it, tends to result in oil smeared up one side of the tube. In that case, the lowest oil position on the stick is the reading. Speaking of tilt issues, my wife's 98 Accord when freshly filled with oil reads around 1/5 high if pointed down our driveway and 1/5 low if pointed up. It isn't a very steep driveway but the oil pan is pretty wide and the dipstick seems to go into one corner. The Prius isn't nearly that sensitive to tilt, but it smears oil up the tube more when it is pulled out.
If you've been on the road and the car's been driving in the last hour but the dipstick in pull it out and flip it over there you go Do not overfill the one NZ keep it between the low and the full mark That's your best bet being right in there you have plenty of oil that's the least of your worries for this day One of my generation twos uses a lot of oil and it still takes it about 2 weeks for it to get from the complete full mark almost to the lowest dot on the dipstick and then I just add 3/4 of a quarter whatever it is and it puts it up almost to the full mark not quite but close and that's plenty No worries You're doing wonderful if you can maintain somewhere in that range Toyota engines are reasonably forgiving but don't overfill them not just leads to foam and a mess..
Pulling the dipstick out is the main reason oil gets pulled up the dipstick tube. I find if you pull the dipstick, then wait about 5 minutes, that oil drains back down, and subsequent dipstick reading is much clearer.
That makes sense. Not terribly convenient to have to stand around 5 minutes to accurately check the oil though! Maybe pull the dipstick, service all the tires, then wipe the dipstick and check the oil, so no wasted time.
Ignore the "high side" reading. Top up the oil based on the low side and move on with life. Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.
I'd like to ignore the low side, but after reading this thread and since I haven't measured accurately during an oil change yet, I'd use the low side on the stick for the bottom mark ( which I've never seen in 7 years) and the hight side of the stick for the full mark. I think everyone that ever looks at the stick, has there own way of trying to figure out which side of the stick to use as the - ture - oil level.
I just checked ours, albeit gen 3. Pulled and wiped the dipstick, layed on the front cross beam. Then went around the four corners, checked tire pressures, to give any drawn up oil a chance to drain back down. Then reinserted and removed dipstick. One side near-perfect clean, the other side a small amount of oil running up the edges, maybe 1/2" extra. But the distinct, actual level about the same both sides. Which is the only thing that makes sense; there's no way the actual level can be say 1/2" higher on one side over the other. Physics won't allow that, lol.
Yes it will, just not under normal use conditions: Car-jack-on-steroids exposes vehicles' underbellies
Must be a lot of engineers in the thread? If you want to make something 10x more difficult, take 10x as long and cost 10x as much, get an engineer involved..............the low line is the actual oil level. It is what it is, and believe as you may.
As long as we're talking about it, why does pulling the dipstick out smear so much oil up the tube on this car? On pretty much every other car I have ever owned there might be a tiny bit of oil on the edge on a second dip, but nothing like the mess one sees on a Prius. Is the tube at a shallow angle where it enters the crankcase? Is it just the Gen 2's that do this, or is it a "feature" of other models too?
