My wife backed out of our garage with the tailgate open and the spoiler broke loose from the lid. It is not scratched at all and in perfect condition but the brackets are broken. New spoilers are $400 - is there anything else i can do?
Have the wife take it to a body shop for repair. You may want to back the car out of the garage for her beforehand.
Keeping the tailgate open while backing up is one way to improve rear visibility. Who needs bak up cameras
attach a thin rope to the shock mounting arms to limit how far it opens. try to position it towards the outside edge to keep it from damaging the hatch gasket when closed. (i've seen other post on here where people use many different things.)
The day I got my Prius I closed the garage door while the tailgate was open and the center hinge scraped a lovely two inch stripe in the spoilers clearcoat! At least you can reattach the spoiler, I gotta look at that scratch every day!
You won't believe this, but same thing happened to me twice.... First the Gen II. And again after I got the Gen III not the first day but first week ... the weird thing is the garage door closed without any trouble over the the hatch ... somehow it scratched when I opened the door next day ... Thankfully it was only "touching" it but hard so a deep scratch ... (the part is plastic so this is really just esthetic... Well, I could match the color with a black permanent marker pretty close (note all spoiler on Gen III IS BLACK (if I am not mistaken). You really have look at it to notice ....
In my case the black paint wasn't scratched, except a nick at the edge of the spoiler. It's the clearcoat, and that's hard to repair without redoing the whole spoiler! Meh, I'm the only one who can see it, just have to cry inside!
