Before my 2016 Gen4, I had a 2007 Gen2, and with the Gen2, I hardly ever got brakes done. Maybe once very five years? But since I've bought the Gen4 in 2021, I've had the front brakes done on 7/13/2023 and again on 10/15/2025. And I've had the rear done on 8/1/2024 and again on 6/1/2026. Roughly every 2 years I'm doing the brakes, due to excessive vibration. I live in NJ, so plenty of salt during the winter months (quite a lot last year, as it was really cold and lots of snow). I'm a light braker and use adaptive cruise control a lot, so the real brakes aren't engaging. What can I do to keep these brakes going? It's costing me half a grand every time! Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Time aside, how fast are you piling on the miles? if you read carefully through Toyota USA’s Warranty and Maintenance Booklet, every 30k miles (or tri-yearly, whichever comes first) they omit the mention of brake “visual” inspection, instead talk about checking rotor specs. Very vague, but I’d take that to mean do a full brake inspection at that interval, ie: lifting off the caliper, inspecting/cleaning and reliving. Still, the more popular approach with a lot of owners is to just ignore the brakes, till you’re hearing noises, feeling a pulsation in the pedal, spongy feel, and so on.
I bought the car at 56K miles in 2021, and it's at 109K now, so that's about 10K miles a year, which I think is fairly normal. I'd happily go for brake service at 30K! Right now I'm doing them every 20K...
Our Brake rotors tend to accumulate surface rust due to limited use. I periodically get my Prius up to 30 MPH, turn off the regenerative braking (shift to neutral) and lightly apply the brakes to clean the rotors (repeat until brake noise goes away). The other brake maintenance items are to lubricate the caliper slide pins and check the water absorption level of the brake fluid every two years. I have never had to do a brake job in 22 years of driving Prii. JeffD
I've had to do two break services for my GMCs over the last 30 years - each of those at about the 150,000 mile mark but that's only one data point. If you're having to do brake service as often as you describe you 'may' not be a horrible driver.... You 'may' not live in a horribly congested urban hellscape where you're locked in traffic jams for hours every day..... You 'may' not drive a horrible car or have it serviced by 'horrible' technicians.... You 'may' not live in an unimaginably horrible climate where local victims have to salt and sand the roads every few years..... HOWEVER (comma!) I will submit that your brake wear is abnormally high, and you 'may' be doing SOMETHING to contribute to it - especially as a 10k per year driver. You drive a G4 which makes things easy - the next time you need brake work use OEM parts or spend a little bit more money and 'white sheet' all four corners at a place like Midas that will "back their brake parts (shoes, pads) with a Golden Guarantee limited lifetime warranty, meaning the parts are covered for as long as you own your car...." - or so they claim. At the very least you will earn the right for them to explain to you WHY your brakes start vibrating afterwards if this winds up being the case. Many if not most tire shops also do brakes and some of the better of these will offer a better guarantee than a place like Midas whose guarantees can be sketch. -Good Luck!
That's your rotors warping; most likely due to inferior materials and/or mismatched pads and rotor materials. I would do what @ETC(SS) stated; Find a local tire and brake shop that will give you a lifetime warranty on the brake job. You'll pay a little more, but your already out $1K per axle over the last 4 years. I've actually had customers that literally drove with one foot on the brake pedal - and their brakes lasted longer than that. Good Luck....
I remember a Car Care Nut video where he warned against using non Toyota parts for the brakes because it resulted in the exact consequences you describe. FWTW
I was about to start by asking for more details on what the "excessive vibration" feels like. A warped rotor is a classic cause of vibration, a classic kind of vibration whose frequency goes with the wheel speed. In conventional cars, you'd often feel it as a pulsation in the pedal. The Prius brake system has enough electronic control between the pedal and the brakes to normally mask that pedal pulsation. The gen 3 repair manual suggests a trick of unplugging the pedal stroke sensor before a test drive, which disables enough of the electronic control that you will then feel the pedal pulsate if a disc is warped. I don't know if the same trick applies in gen 4. If it doesn't, or if you just want to verify warping the sure-fire way, that always works: But there are other kinds of feeling that a person might call 'vibration'. The usual Prius rotor-surface-rust quirk is just a scrapey sound when it's mild, but when it's not as mild it's a roughness or grabbiness you can feel. If that fits the description of the vibration, then that's a very well-known Prius recurring issue that is simple to deal with, by just making your next few normal stops in neutral, which disables regen and ensures enough brake pressure is used to wipe the surface rust off. You probably already knew about that, with this not being your first Prius. If you came in with that condition to a Toyota dealer, you'd expect them to know about that and teach you about making some stops in neutral to clear it up. At an independent shop, they might be less likely to know that piece of Prius trivia. But we even had a report eleven years ago where an actual Toyota dealer (who definitely should know better!) just kept happily taking $xxx to $xxxx each time from a near-retirement customer every time she came in with that condition, sending her back with "new factory brakes" each time.
I actually don't feel it on the pedal, but rather in the steering wheel. And I figure it's some kind of a warping or something uneven, because I actually feel it MORE as the car slows down, and the vibration feels more pronounced since it's now not as frequent. So it's like if I'm forcefully braking at 40mph, I don't feel it as much until it goes below 20mph, if that makes sense. There is no sound associated with this vibration, BTW, this time in my rear. I definitely had some scraping/screeching with my front brakes when I had them done last October.
The kind of dial indicator shown in that drawing is not very expensive at places like Harbor Freight, and would be an easy way to be sure whether a warped rotor is or isn't the problem, and if so, which one(s).
I've got over 50K miles on mine and do a lot of mountain driving in the Sierras. No issues and my 2012 Prius C; just shy of 100K miles when totaled out was still on it's original OEM set-up. Same driving conditions, though the Prime handles the Sierras much better than the buzzy Prius C.
Someone else reported repeatedly needing new gen 4 brakes awhile back. I forget the outcome, but I think it was road salt. Might have been poor material quality
That makes sense; but dragging the brakes for a few yards will usually take care of that. This doesn't prevent unscrupulous mechanics from selling you a full brake job for something that's normal......
