Hello, new to Priuschat here! But I have been working on Priuses for about 5 years now, and I have done almost everything on these cars except for body work. Anyway, I noticed that there are 2 versions of power steering motors on the 3rd gen Prius a brush type and a brush less type. Does anyone know if there is any practical difference between the two? Thanks.
One of the Toyota technical courses, "Course 071 Toyota Hybrid System", besides being a pretty great all-around introduction to the car, has some info about that on pages 166–169. The basic breakdown looks like the Gen 3 model trims with 16 15 inch wheels got the package with no rotation angle sensor and a brush DC motor operating on 12 volts. The trims with 17 inch wheels (or some of them, anyway?) got the package with a rotation angle sensor (resolver), a brushless motor operating on a higher voltage, three-phase supply, and a different steering ECU that includes the voltage boost and the three-phase drive using the information from the resolver. Clearly you'd never be able to switch any of those components without switching all of them. That PDF is, of course, on techinfo.toyota.com, where one $15 cover charge gets you two days of access to everything that's there, but it's also usually not hard to scare up a copy elsewhere. -Chap
