I'm looking to change my suspension on my Prius- got it checked by a mechanic and he confirmed it was indeed my struts. I'm looking to change all 4; instructions for the front seem pretty straight forward and easy to find, especially that I am looking to get a loaded/pre-assembled coil and replace everything (whole strut assembly + sway bar, links, control arm if necessary, etc) However, for the rear, I've run into some problems as I don't find any pre-assembled struts for the rear on rock auto, which led me to question if there was even coils in the rear (no idea if cars can be made without this lol) because all 'rear' parts, are just shock absorbers (when I look in the pre-assembled sections), but on certain sites, I find individual loose pieces for the strut assembly in the rear. When I look, I don't see the coils in the back like I do in the front, but google tells me 2010s have coils...so would rather be safe than sorry and ask pros So my question would be what am I looking for to replace rear struts as well? PS: don't try to convince me to just bring it in, I may not be a mechanic but I have a very hard head and will figure it out I've changed my own head gasket with A LOT of support from this forum, so I'm hoping the same can happen for the suspension. Thank you so much
If you bend your head down behind your gen 3 Prius and look, you'll see that year does not have strut assemblies in back, it just has ordinary shock absorbers and ordinary coil springs next to them.
Yes this was another reason for my request because when I looked I saw no coils yet google was telling me a 2010 did have coils! Thank you for confirming
The rear have a separate spring, independent of the shock. I would steer clear of rockauto. I went with them, and one of the front's failed in just a few hundred miles. Took a while for a replacement. Then a few thousand miles later, the other one failed, and so did the replacement one. There "lifetime" warranty, is for a "one time" replacement. Then they do a refund. It was a pain. I went to autozone and got the complete strut. 3 year warranty. I've never had a problem with autozone in 35+ years. You likely don't need control arms. They last a long time!
thanks for the info. Do you know what the company of the struts was? Since Rockauto is like the distribution center, unless they have a house brand I'm unaware of