2012 Prius shakes,dealer says its normal!

welcome to priuschat! first, 37k on the oem's is outstanding. second, did you get michelin energy savers? you need to go to a good alignment place i think, the dealers have their place, but probably not for tires. all the best!

 

Mine has always shaken a bit at higher speeds. It is normal.


iPhone ?

 

I have a bit of vibration from the drive train at highway speeds on my '13. I'm going to take it in after a fill up or two to check the alignment. My '10 had a vibration at 65-70mph but I think that was contributed to a worn hub. I'm sure that most of my '10s life it lived vibration free. 92,000 miles before I traded her in.

 

Your alignment can be off and still track straight.

Did the shake happen during your tech drives? You said the tech couldn't feel it but could you? If it is drivetrain related, you can easily put the car on a lift and step on the pedal to 65-72 mph.

 

No shakes with my 2012 I would take it in to a shop that does alignments , balancing
And frame work. Then go from there good luck

 

I had a similar problem with another car over a decade ago. I finally found a tire/alignment shop with the equipment to grind the tires round. That plus a dynamic balance actually worked.

 

Every tire and alignment store in the nation, will tell you that cupped tires = bad shocks.

If you question the alignment; do not go to Toyota. Go instead to a place like Firestone who offers a lifetime alignment package. Toyota wants to re-align my Prius every 20k miles. They are simply hungry for things they can charge me for.

But mis-reading tread wear, ... they want to avoid replacing your shocks for some reason.



btw, our Prius is at 45k and no shake here.

 

Most cupping issues can be traced to alignment issues. The Prius offers no adjustment in the rear (unless you do shims), so that probably exacerbates the issue for some vehicles. Some tires are simply more prone to cupping than others.

Also, I have a lifetime alignment from Firestone, but I would not recommend it. The quality of the work is truly inconsistent, and a lot of times I will get the car back with a steering wheel that is off-center. The techs there are simply not familiar with newer vehicles, and they refuse to understand the proper alignment procedure and often fail to perform the required zero-point calibration after the alignment (even though Hunter codelink can handle it).

 

Last month I had to spend a day at a commercial tire outlet replacing rubber on my dump truck. In my boredom I looked over their wall charts showing various forms of tread wear. Otherwise I am no mechanic. Certainly not an expert on this stuff

By brand? Tread pattern?

My Toyota dealership recently installed an alignment thing in their carport, as each vehicle is dropped-off, they automatically get a printout of your alignment. I am certain that it is purely to increase their revenue stream. At 20k they did an alignment on my Prius, and again at 40k they wanted to do another alignment. After discussing it here, I had decided to have all of our alignments done at Firestone to take advantage of their 'lifetime' guaranty.

In full disclosure, I have not gone to Firestone yet. To me, the car handles great. I can not detect any alignment issues. So I was going to delay until the next time that the dealership says it needs another alignment.

So what is the answer?

 

All the rental Prii I have driven since mid 2009 have not shaken at any speed. My 2012 is glass smooth at any legal speed or above

Mike

 

Nonsense. Bad alignment will do. Actually it did it to my previous set of tires. No problems after it was fixed.

why don't you qualify this? how bad vibrations are we talking about?

 

I am around 25k mile mark on my 2012. I have felt a slight vibration around 65 to 70 mph from the day I got my car too. However, I noticed vibration is most noticeable while driving on certain highways, and is almost non existent (cannot tell if it is a vibration or just feel of the road) in others so for now I have decided to blame the roads and don't do anything about it.

 

RobH talked about getting the tires 'dynamically balanced'. I haven't heard of that in a long time.

That is where the tire/wheel/brake disc/hub are all spun up on the car with a powered roller. An accelerometer is attached to the suspension somewhere. It's on the blue jack in this vid.
Is this what you are talking about RobH?

With the Prius you may have to put it in 'Test Mode' to spin the front wheels.

This procedure would be a good last ditch test to see if you have out of balance brake discs or something off center in one of the hubs. If you had a 'Road Force Balancing' done and still have the shakes, something is not right.

I didn't know shops still had this equipment but it will temporarily cure a weird balance situation. You have to keep the wheels on the same studs after doing it.

This is a blast from the past! But it would at least tell you if, and where you had a balance problem.

 

I had the same with new tires! On a new car. The dealer had the tires balanced, the were ok and still a shake. They were not capable to solve this problem. I went to specialised tire-shop, and the noticed that the tires were not evenly round. They changed the the best ones to the front and advised me to go back to the dealer and ask for better tires. Most of the shaking dissapeared with the changing of the cupped tires to the back.

 

Priglass2,
You said you had the tires 'Road Force Balanced', correct?
Can you ask that shop to do it again and let you watch?
Those dealer guys don't like doing warranty work that won't make them money.

I had new tires mounted on new 17" wheels and had them Road Force balanced. 3 of them were at '6lbs' and 1 was at 20lbs of road force. I was told to keep that one on the rear and "maybe I won't feel it". ( I bought the wheels and tires as a 'take-off' from person that upgraded his Scion F-SR)

If all is well with the roundness and balance of the tires, indeed, you have to look at the car.
As you said, bent axle ( but how does that happen?), out of balance brake discs, out of roundness on a hub/axle front or rear are all possibilities.
When you drive one front wheel and not the other the spider gears (in just the differential) are getting a workout, but since it is not for long and no real loads are happening, it should be fine. On the Prius you have to put it in 'Test Mode', which is just a bunch of key strokes to disable traction control. I don't have the routine in front of me now, but you will need it for your testing idea and if you find a shop that can do 'Dynamic Balancing'.

Hopefully you just have a bad tire and not some weirdness with the hubs/axles/discs.... Good Luck !!

 

That would certainly cause an issue.

 

Just because the dealer says they balanced out fine, doesn't mean that there isn't a problem with the tires.

I had a dealer mount some new tires on my 18" wheels. I took the car out and there were noticeable vibration issues and bouncing between 60mph+. I took it back, and the tires balanced out fine, but looking at the tires as they spun on the system, you could visually see a "hop" on the wheel. TireRack sent me a replacement tire for that one. I also eventually took all those wheels and tires to a specialty shop that had a Roadforce balancer to get them all rebalanced.

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So I recently (last week) got rid of the 2010 Prius and the newer Prius did have vibration issues at 65mph+. I had them roadforce the OE wheels before I stored them away for the winter, and they were able to do some slight corrections to the factory balance. No more vibrations.

 

I had a car a few years ago (not a prius) that had a shaking issue like that. Turned out it was a brake rotor that was warped.