Thoughts on Keeping a 2004–2009 Prius Running Strong

How many miles does your 2007 have? That will affect some advice.

Otherwise change transmission fluid, both coolants, brake fluid

Change oil and filter every 5k mileage

Clean the hybrid battery fan

 

Attached a couple of spreadsheets (and pdf conversions), table format summary of the event-by-event schedule published by Toyota USA. One per the booklet, the other extrapolated to 240k miles.

I'd be looking into:

1. Brake inspection
2. Brake fluid replacement
3. Coolant replacement (engine and inverter
4. Coolant pump replacements (engine and inverter), plus coolant thermostat on the engine.
5. PCV valve replacement
6. Spark plug replacement
7. Engine oil and filter replacement
8. Engine and cabin air filter inspect and/or replacement
9. Wiper blade inspect and/or replacement
10. Throttle body cleaning
11. Tire inspection
12. Rodent proofing
13. 12 volt battery inspection and maintaining
14. Hybrid battery inspection and maintaining
15. Thorough wash including wheel wells, occasional waxing, interior cleaning

Depending on where you are in the "USA", rust mitigation may be a consideration as well.

 

My cents:

* Check/fix brake pins and rubber boots, they are often in bad shape and destroy the mpg and the actual brakes.
* Use a ctek or similar charger with an extended connector to easily keep 12V healthy.
* Check and clean throttle body and MAF with carbon solvents/propanol - or more expensive products….
* Install front splash guards and if in rusty geography, check rear wheel front arch/rocker for very common rust issues. Open if bubbly paint, rust prevent with raw linseed oil or similar and re-seal.

* OEM: I nowadays only buy OE from amayama.com, shipped from Japan. It’s cheaper and smoother compared to dealerships (duh) OR toyotaparts sites.

Also, their active blueprints are genius and show all components from the manual with clickable context in the pictures.
https://www.amayama.com/en/genuine-catalogs/epc/toyota-europe/prius/NHW20L

 

^ for #4 in my previous list, definitely research the need for replacement first. And the interval.

I’m more familiar with gen 3, where the two water pumps, the engine one in particular, are failure prone, by 150k miles, so every 100k is prudent replacement interval. Not that familiar with gen 2 though.

 

Agreed, my gen 2 inverter coolant pump went bad around 130k. It’s not difficult to replace, so maybe just save the money until it’s actually needing to be replaced

 

Off-topic: with gen 3 removing the inverter coolant pump is frustratingly difficult: it's VERY reachable from below the car, but one or more of the fasteners is not accessible from below, and the only apparent way to get it out is from above, by first removing the entire inverter. Definitely an engineering black-eye.

 

Toyota USA parts website used to show similar (perhaps the same?) parts diagrams. Then they revised the site, ostensibly to improve it I would think, but the readily apparent reason would appear to be to hamstring the site. Not sure of the motive, but seems like they wanted to make it mostly useless, at least for searching, force potential shoppers back to dealerships. Or Amayama...

You can use a hybrid approach, determine the part no on Amayama, then plug it in at Toyota USA's parts website, take advantage of the function that links local dealership parts departments, and see their "street prices".

Being in Canada I've so far just purchased from Amayama, but if it was something massive, say an engine short block, it might be cheaper to go the hybrid route, and buy it just across the border. Depending on what it cost with customs. (looks like there's currently a 25% surtax )

 

Likely their developers are not competent enough to create sustainable links from an image overlay number to a url, it’s a super useful and impressive trick.

It’s indeed a great way to filter for correct OE#, but if the actor also have the best price for an original Toyota part, why go elsewhere? It’s just profit margins added…

Perhaps some can hope for TrumpImports.com, but I would avoid.

 

The old parts.toyota.com had all that, and it worked really well.

Then they ditched it to bring out autoparts.toyota.com instead, where you can't search on diagrams, half the time can't even see a useful diagram, and you don't get the old site's useful detailed part descriptions with vehicle fitment crossreferences and additional markings and such, and instead you get like a two-paragraph AI-slop 'description' that repeats the part name a lot with stock phrases like preserving the great performance of your Toyota, all the better to manipulate search engines with, my dear.

For a while, there were a bunch of dealers seeing it for what it was and sticking to the old system for their own parts sites, but it seems they've most or all been whipped into line now.