The handbook for Toyota technical training course TIN517A, 2017 Toyota New Technology Update, is now available by subscription to techinfo.toyota.com. Written for service technicians, it has five sections (80 pages) dedicated to the Prius Prime. Readers of New Car Features will see much that is familiar, but there are some new illustrations, plus a few facts I hadn’t seen elsewhere: for example, the usable life span of the Toyota-supplied charging cable, enforced by its firmware, is 30,000 charges, with a warning at 29,900 charges. An excerpt from the Table of Contents follows.
Is 30,000 charges like a phone where it counts from "empty" to "full" or just every time you connect the charger to the car? 30,000 charges is a lot.
You mean I’ll have to replace my cable at 82 years, if I charge once a day? Why can’t Toyoya make parts that last?
The documentation isn’t clear. I imagine it’s the latter, since the charging cable may not be able to determine the car’s state of charge, and the life-limiting part is probably the charging connector, which wears according to the number of plug/unplug cycles rather than the amount of charge transferred.
There are several Toyota service training courses, for which the handbooks are available by subscription to techinfo.toyota.com, that have information about second-generation (and other!) Prius cars. These include: Toyota Hybrid Systems (Course T071) Toyota Hybrid System Diagnosis (Course T072) Hybrid General Service (Course T256) Smart Key System (Course T973B) The same site also has courses, not specific to the Prius or to hybrid vehicles, on engines, emission controls, suspension, brakes, air conditioning, electrical diagnosis, collision repair, and other subjects. The course handbooks are posted as PDF files that can be saved or printed for later reference.
