Techstream EGR Valve Blockage Data

Most of the downloaded versions going around, people have made by clicking Print to PDF lots and lots of times in the online manual. The blue [INFO] buttons that, in the manual, are cross-reference links to more detailed procedures, end up in the PDF as blue [INFO] boxes that don't do anything.

The details at the target of the link will still be present somewhere in the PDF (assuming it's complete), and can usually be found by doing a search in your PDF viewer for the exact string of text preceding the [INFO] button. (It will be one of the hits, with the rest being all the other places there's an [INFO] button referring to the same place.)

That's assuming the PDF is complete, which it might not be; people clicking Print to PDF hundreds of times can easily miss some.

The Repair Manual is written that way. It pretty much assumes you've studied the New Car Features Manual, which is also available the same way, and primes you in the basics of what the different systems and pieces are, what they do, and how they work. The Repair Manual makes more sense then.

Also, if you've looked at the New Car Features manual and you're still not totally feeling like a Toyota trained tech, don't ignore the Quick Technical Guides that are also there, and the entire library of "University of Toyota" technician training course materials. If you're signed in to TIS (or its Euro version) for access to the manuals, you also have all of that at your fingertips.

I don't know how much time you've spent looking at the New Car Features Manual or the Repair Manual, but I think your preconception here that they are written to keep you in the dark would be hard for you to support with examples representatively drawn from those sources.

While you might be able to find several dozen pages (out of several thousand) in the Repair Manual where one or maybe three specific details have been replaced with "TMC's intellectual property", that leaves a vast amount of material where they have been very forthcoming about what is what, what it does, and how it does it, often with simplified schematics and theory of operation.

For the fraction of details where they do fall back on "TMC's intellectual property", I suspect they are thinking less about keeping "normal people" in the dark, and more about that detail revealing to a competitor what solution they came up with to some tricky problem. I've not often run across a "TMC's intellectual property" detail that prevented me understanding or diagnosing the car at the level I need.

Seems to me the idea that they're out to "assure normal people don’t know anything about the science / structure behind any system" is easier to believe before actually looking at what they provide.

Unless you think they knowingly falsify what they put in the manuals.

In 18 years, I can think of about 3 times I have found an error in a Toyota manual. They have a form on the TIS website for reporting those. They reply promptly by email, and fix them. (PDF copies already floating around, of course, don't get fixed.)

 

Yeah, it helps that Toyota is quite consistent, using the same letter-by-letter descriptions.

 

So much to quote and reply here to @ChapmanF self assured reasoning, unfortunately I don’t have the time to retort to it all, and will keep it short.

I do have the entire 7500 pages of the G3 repair manual since purchase. You can never know what other people know. It’s the internet.

Toyotas instructions and repair manual are written once, at the time of release of the car. That is not the definition of any objective science concept. It’s Toyotas wishes and hopes.

Any new information are never/very rarely updated officially in any docs - they are issued as TSB.

And this is for desperate issues, risking potential very costly full recalls, if that kind of regulation exist in your country of origin.

Since you apparently work with this, it's very natural you rarely seek the repair manual.

That is unlikely the average priuschat user background. Could we agree?

 

That is indeed just the worst kind of ”restricted sharing”/piracy and should always be condemned. Creating any profit for yourself makes it all void.

However, the general official concept from Toyota of demanding payment and restricting access to repair manuals seem very much in line of the same reasoning as those pirates….

This is a dying concept.

 

We had a string of Hondas over the decades, and I invariably shelled out about $100 CDN for the Honda Shop Manual, purchased through Helm Inc. They were city phone book sized tomes, thin paper, very well written, clear illustrations.

Just doing a single valve clearance adjustment recouped the investment: dealership would charge $300~400 for that procedure.

Now, at least from Toyota, everything’s online, $ub$cription-ba$ed, illustrations are screen-grabs from a model, and the writing’s “slipped”, to put it politely.

 

I assume you mean the PDF file with 7595 pages, with the troubleshooting details missing for most of the HV system codes, and the SRS/airbag section that really is for gen 2? That's the same one I've got.

I salute the efforts of the people who clicked "Print to PDF" as many times as that took, even if they still missed things, and merged in the wrong airbag section. It's handy to have, and lets me quickly look up most questions that don't involve something it's missing. If I need something it's missing, or need to check whether there's been an update, then I re-up my TIS subscription and check online.

Can you clarify what made you think so? The one clear benefit from Toyota's full transition to online for the manuals is how much it reduces the cost and hassle of updating. Naturally, what gets updated online isn't going to magically appear in our PDF copies.

As one example, if you look up the customer satisfaction program and accompanying TSB for gen 3 inverter failures, you'll see that the TSB directs the technician to follow the repair manual instructions for replacing the internal inverter components. Then you'll look in your PDF repair manual and not find any instructions for that—only for replacing the inverter altogether. The whole subsections on internal repair are newer than that. You find them right where they belong in the online version, though.

Also, as I've mentioned, the very few times I've used the online form to report an error in a repair manual, they've replied to me very promptly about fixing it. They don't care that I'm a nobody or not a dealer tech or whatever, if I found an error (and they check and say yup, look at that, he's right) they fix it.

In the US, the exact terms under which you get access to the manuals under TIS can be matched up like hand-to-glove with what the US (read: Massachusetts) right-to-repair law requires. I assume that the terms of your toyota-tech.eu site (which are slightly different from the US terms; for example, you guys get an extra-cheap partial-day rate, while our cheapest is two days) are similarly matched to what EU law requires. If the law required less, they'd be doing less, and if the law required more, they'd be doing more. It's as if the company was answering to shareholders rather than philanthropists.

That suggests that one promising way to push for better options from the companies would be to push for those options with the folks who write the laws.

You could advocate for such improvements with the Swedish or EU legislators. Here in the US, the outlook seems bleak for the time being: if you breathe the idea that some regulation on corporate conduct could serve the public interest, you get called a communist and probably get death threats, and even the existing law you wanted to improve probably gets gutted or repealed. There have been windows for improvement in RtR laws in the past, and there might be such windows in the future, but right now does not seem to be one in the US.

A professional organization I belong to has recently gone open-access with all its journals.

That didn't happen overnight; it's been in discussion for years, there were some incremental steps along the way, and a lot of careful thought about how to keep the lights on and the paychecks to the people who get paychecks. Seems to have happened without raising member dues, which is nice.

It may have helped that the organization is non-profit, and answers not to shareholders but to members, and is filled with members, like me, who think open access is good.

That doesn't mean we totally believe in violating the rights of copyright holders who haven't come around to agreeing with us yet.

 

@ChapmanF Thanks for that inside information.

However, no one beside Toyota dealerships uses the online sources for more than payment allows.

That is really not a good/smart concept for anyone apart from those target audiences (dealers) (which are not the same as priuschat readers…).

It’s just so unfortunate Toyota cannot auto update my pirated 7500 pages PDF…

And this seem to be the case for many Toyota dealerships aswell. They move on and never read this updated documentation, they use old info.

That is not good for the longevity of any car. It’s not copyright, it’s pure company centered greed. I do know they are rectifying this soon, but it’s almost to late…

 

The right to repair concept is very different from any regulation coming from America; Federally. State wise is not relevant for the industry! (unless California: without their state focus, Toyota would never have tested the Prius concept live).

This isn’t the way forward - unless the entity complaining only wish to sell new cars. And some people defend this?

People use older cars. And we payed up for those. Let us know how to fix those, as with Apple verdicts.

Why only allow company focus on newer cars - when they hardly ever achieve even gen2 Prius MPG?

 

The "right to repair" can be thwarted by "capable of being repaired":

I was watching a South Main Auto episode: a car was in the shop with a failed ECM (Electronic Control Module). New replacement parts are simply not available, and while there are salvage units to be had, they have a specific VIN programmed in, and it must match the car it's in. Eric (the owner) found a salvage part, took out multiple-hundred USD subscriptions, purportedly capable of changing the programmed VIN, without success.

He said his last resort was to mail the unit to a "guy", who was able to change the VIN, perhaps at hardware level, somehow, and if successful, mail it back.

At this point he paused, looked at the camera and started some exasperated pontificating: "you're never going to see these cars in a classic car show"...

 

I'm not sure what you meant to say there, like, just making sense of the words; can you try another phrasing?

I mean, the system doesn't let you use it "for more than payment allows", so it seems tautologically true that no one is using it for more than that. At the same time, what payment allows is access to all of the manuals, bulletins, quick guides, diagrams, tech notes, and technician training courses that are present there. While I've never used the system "for more than payment allows", I certainly have used it for all kinds of the stuff payment does allow, which is a honkin' lot of stuff. I'm not a dealership or anybody connected with Toyota. But once I've paid a subscription, why would I stop short of using what that payment allows?

That sounds like interesting news. What's going to be rectified, and how, and who is 'they'?

The law effectively governing these automaker practices in the US is the one that Massachusetts passed in 2012. The automakers and their trade groups then agreed to meet the requirements of the Massachusetts law in all fifty states. As to why they agreed to that so readily, plausible speculation is to take the wind out of other right-to-repair initiatives in other states or at the federal level that could have imposed more stringent requirements.

The Massachusetts measure carried the name "Right to Repair", even if it doesn't satisfy your understanding of the concept.

If you're in Sweden then its quite understandable that you might not have closely followed the US legislative history here. At the same time, it may be worth reviewing if you mean to comment on it.

 

Well, just comical to me; even twenty states don’t make it a federal law. I might know a lot more than you think about the US.

But you do not know much about European regulation and mandates - and still comment on that. It’s natural.

It could all be global regulation, but US has worked against this for every year I know of.

 

Any time my comments on those topics include making specific claims about them that are demonstrably ill-informed (I'm human, it can happen), please let me know.

That's a fair point. I tend to start out with a kind of neutral "I don't know how much this person knows", and then adjust up or down as the person makes strikingly well-informed or ill-informed claims.

When you posted

that was striking enough to warrant a downward adjustment.

As already covered upthread, it was Massachusetts legislation that currently guides the automakers' RtR practices in all 50 states. Not federal, not California. By the automakers and their trade groups signing on to follow it in 50 states before a stronger initiative came along.

 

Its seem like all this is, is irrelevant prejudice of Europeans. Please just try to keep focus on the thread topic and deliver information.

Focus is not me. Internet is open comment territory.

 

State wise is not relevant for the industry! (unless California...
@ChapmanF ;
that was striking enough to warrant a downward adjustment.

How? Aggregation for you is not an objective analysis. You don’t live in California? It’s like a very big country with a lot of regulation/commercial might and have dictated many mandates for many years.

 

Your claim in post #368 was this:

Now in your post #374 we see this:

which is a successful argument that California actions can be "relevant for the industry"—but that was never the problem with your claim in #368, because in that post you already allowed for California actions to be relevant.

The problem in #368 was your blanket claim that for other states ("unless California") "State wise is not relevant for the industry".

Because a direct counterexample—a state that isn't California enacting legislation that becomes "relevant for the industry"—is the current US Right-to-Repair situation, the exact topic that you were purporting to talk about.

It originated in Massachusetts and became "relevant to the industry" because the automakers and their trade groups signed on to be bound by it throughout the US.

Not knowing that bit of history would be ok, for someone not trying to talk about the US RtR situation.

Knowing it before you posted in #368 could have saved you from making a claim about what is or isn't "relevant to the industry" that has a direct counterexample in the very topic you're talking about.

 

Just ignoring you / this. Your assertion right to repair originated in Boston says it all. You misinformed and bitter.

 

For anyone else reading, and thinking I ever asserted "right to repair originated in Boston", for the record:

"Right to Repair" as a movement/ideology is widespread and worldwide, and did not originate in Boston.

Within the US specifically, there have been RtR initiatives in many state legislatures and in the federal legislature, many in the early 2010s. Not all of those passed.

As far as the RtR practices that automakers are currently following in their US activities, those are the ones that passed in Boston in 2012, which the automakers quickly agreed to follow nationwide, before another state or the federal legislature could pass something more strict. This is just the straight-up history of how it has played out in the US, which anyone who thinks I am "misinformed and bitter" is free to look up independently.

That's just the history specific to the US, and not any comment on the state of play elsewhere in the world.

There is also some more recent news on the state of play in the US. Massachusetts passed a later update strengthening their state RtR law, in 2020, but automakers sued. That suit was not fully resolved until February 2025, in the federal district court for the District of Massachusetts.

Massachusetts is now free to enforce those stricter requirements in their own state—but I do not see any news of automakers agreeing to follow those nationwide, as they did with the 2012 enactment.

 

These values must be totally relative to each vehicle. I just looked at our 2012 that's just shy of 140K miles and zero EGR maintenance, and it reports a value of 20.82, which seems pretty good relative to other values being reported. I still hope to clean everything in the next couple weeks (and hope I don't find evidence in cyl #2 that I'm too late though I'm not buying a pressurizing tool to verify).

 

Why would you think? They were all built with the same throttle bores and egr coolers and piping diameters and intake manifolds and engine displacements ....

 

You have mentioned a few times how it's just doing this test whenever it can while driving so those situational/environmental factors must come into play as well as some have reported values that vary a fair bit before and after cleaning. 20+ seems to be "good" after cleaning, yet ours has not been yet. Thus, reading through this thread suggests that there isn't really some definitive "good" number, below which you should clean.