This could be, mine is a 0 and I have really had a lot of rattles. I thought I had them under control but another one cropped up yesterday. I have decided you just can't fix them all, or get them fixed either.
No fun hunting down rattles Suppose if you had a second vehicle and a heck of a lot of ambition, you could turn your Prii into a kit and put it back together watching for areas of rubbing and so forth. Wonder if all the 10/11 V/Five's came from the #0 plant? I have driven a bunch of 10/11 rental Prii and found some quiet and some rattle to beat hell. Kind of makes for a poor reputation with a bunch of rattle box cars on the road. If there was only a way to get direct feedback to a specific factory's QC team so they could implement changes to eliminate issues. I feel all our breaths (posts) here go nowhere but to make us feel good for telling our stories Mike
Let's just face it, plastic and rattles are synonymous. The Prius is a cheaply made car and it's going to have it's share of creeks and moans. God, I love this car!!!
GenIII = great power train, terribly cheap, Yaris-like quality interior plastics galore. You don't buy a toyota for its nice interior, you just don't.
The 11 digit in mine is a one(1), however I do not have any rattles as of yet! Knock on wood! My Prius is solid and quiet! It would break my heart is it would rattle, it is the quiet that I love most, next to MPGs.
I'm gonna keep the thread informed. But as of right now, I'm not trading anyone, that Prius is my little baby. As a matter of fact, I was walking by a Mustang today and thought yeah they look cool, then a Camara, (which I think are even better looking) and the more I thought about it the more I was sure I'm simply not trading. My little blue Prius is exactly what I want in my garage at this stage of my life. It just perfect.
My 2010 with 62k is fairly quite, really cold weather and arough road will bring out a few rattles other then that it's good, just crank up the tunes, a little Kid Rock works for me.....
I've got standard 17" rims with Michelin Primacy tyres, which are supposed to be one of the quietest, so I don't think it's the tyres, it's just the resonance through the tinny body, either that or my suspension rubber mounts are made of something harder.
Broken front stabilizer bar link maybe? When they wear out, they make a sort of clunkity-clunk sound on rough surfaces. If you let it go long enough, it'll continue to wear and finally break.
The stabilizer bar has been exchanged recently, the shock absorbers also, but the noise remains ... the mechanic says that it can be the vibration of something that is under the dashboard but does not dare to take it apart ....
The fact that there were resent repairs done to the front suspension is highly suspicious. If this noise wasn’t present before, then I could almost guarantee that something was left loose...namely the sway bar links. They think that they are tight but if they aren’t correctly torqued to specs. they can rattle like hell.
