Hi there. New to the forum, and fresh Prius owner. My partner and I bought a 2012 Prius Plug-In last month and have been absolutely happy with it. We've already done a couple of upgrades on it. The other day I finally cornered a rattle sound down to the front passenger side support hold (handhold, the thing you grab onto when the driver is driving and turning too sharp). I took the cap off (and sadly think I partially broke it), but couldn't figure out how to go about tightening it all back down so the whole thing doesn't jiggle around anymore. After some amount of Googling I had a hard time locating anything that would help me with this specific car. Does anyone have any advice on how to tackle this? Thanks!
congrats and welcome! sadly, i have never had to deal with this, if no one else has advice, you should be able to find what you need in the service or body manual at tech info.toyota.com all the best!
If I remember right, those are held in place by spring clips, nothing threaded that you could 'tighten'. It's possible one or both of the clips isn't pushed in all the way, so you could try doing that. Or maybe one was damaged, either by an incorrect removal attempt, or a whole lot of force really being applied to the handhold. That might mean, in the worst case, getting replacement spring clips. You'd just squeeze the existing ones to remove them (after pulling out the recalcitrant decorative cover, as you did already), and pop the new ones in. If you look up the PDF instructions for the side-curtain airbag recall, it has good instructions on how those mounting clips are dealt with, IIRC. -Chap
