Prius workshop manuals.

you can download at toyotatechinfo.com for $15. a day, not sure about complete manual. haven't tried it myself, but there are many recommendations here from those with the skills.

 

These days wouldn't the manual just be a website, the TIS? That way Toyota could just update as needed without sending out CD's with the revisions? Just asking.

 

Google "2016 Toyota Prius Repair Manual PDF". It'll be a while, and there are a lot of scams, hopefully you'll find something legit. Expect to spend around $20.

Toyota insists on publishing FOUR paper tomes as the "repair manual", and the current cost for third gen through Helminc is around $240 EACH, and only volume 4 currently available. I'm not even sure which volume is which.

I managed to snag the 3rd gen PDF. It's very terse/unfriendly. The info's there, but...

Honda, in comparison, tends to put out a single paper book per car, they're about 1.5" thick, cost about $100 through Helminc, and decently organized/written.

 

Correct.

 

Mendel finds the Toyota manuals "terse/unfriendly" while I find them to be just what I'm looking for. Diff'rent strokes, I guess.

As far as I know, "paying a lot of money for hard copy books" has not even been an option since about 2011 ... Toyota has committed fully to an online, hyperlinked manual and they no longer even produce a dead-tree version. So it becomes kind of beside the point to talk about how many printed "volumes" it would be ... unless you really wanted to convert it all to a paginated print file, which would be kind of a waste. You'd be sacrificing a lot, because in its native form it is all richly hyperlinked. Sometimes a procedure will look "terse" because it just has a list of steps, where each one has a blue "INFO" box to the right, but you click that box you get taken straight to another part of the manual where there's a whole procedure for that step.

Sometimes on the web you'll find a PDF that someone has generated using browser print-to-file on all the stuff in the manuals, which tends to kill all those hyperlinks and turn them into dead blue boxes that say "INFO" and do you no good when you click them.

The subscription rate at techinfo.toyota.com is not $15 a day ... it's $15 for a two-day period, or longer on a weekend, you can also get a month for $75. Plenty of time to browse around, see what's there that would be helpful to you, and save portions you want to return to offline. The information comes in very reasonable, standard formats: HTML with PNG images for most of the manuals, SVG for the wiring, with really cool Javascript-y features like clicking on one component and having the whole circuit highlighted that involves it.

There are still some agreements that pop up when you subscribe that will make you wonder whether it all only works with WIndows and Internet Explorer, but I think that must be old language left over from years past, because the manual and wiring viewers seem to work just fine nowadays in vanilla Firefox on linux.

As JohnF pointed out, if you just want to view stuff via your subscription, what you see will be always up to date with no worry about what's changed since the version you have. If it is more convenient for you to save and refer to it offline for personally working on your own car, there seem to be plenty of PriusChatters doing that with a general feeling that it's fair.

In the several years I've been on PriusChat, it has not been very common for anyone to download from their subscription and then make that public; that certainly isn't fair use and it doesn't help Toyota pay the people who write (and, very importantly, translate) their manuals. I agree that I'd like them to make it easier to save a personal copy for offline use (right now your only option is section by section), but I understand their concern that if they made one nice "download" button, people would immediately be scalping the stuff, or putting it on warez sites, instead of using it personally.

It's that old classic dynamic where if we want fairness out of Toyota, they need to see fairness out of us too. Even decades ago, I was used to pricing for a factory manual being in the low hundreds. I once priced a set of manuals for a friend's Volvo that came in over $1000. A techinfo subscription starts at $15, that's less than one of the knockoff manuals and the difference is night and day. It's hard to call this unfair pricing.

After signing up and picking your model and year, you'll see something like this:


The row of tabs are the different kinds of documents you've got. Above, I have started with NCF - the New Car Features manual, which is where you should start too. That's what tells you all about what things are in your car and what they do and how they do it and why, all of which is background that the other manuals assume you have. If you ever feel like complaining the Repair Manual doesn't explain something well enough, make sure you've checked in New Car Features.

As for the other tabs, they are:

• SB/TT - service bulletins and technical tips
• RM - the fearsome Repair Manual itself, telling you all about how to diagnose, remove, inspect, disassemble, reassemble, and install, all of the things you learned about in New Car Features.
• EWD - the Electrical Wiring Diagram, with all the spiffy live features I alluded to earlier.
• SC - Service Campaigns - any recalls, warranty extensions, etc. being made available for known issues.
• ACCY - manuals for accessories.
• CR - collision repair - this is for you if you have skills in metal cutting, welding, and brazing ... all the ordinary repairs you can do with screwdrivers and wrenches are in the Repair Manual.
• QTG - Quick Technical Guides on all kinds of subjects you might want to learn about.

Below the tabs, you'll see a list of sections from the selected manual, but not necessarily all of them; the list is designed as a search result (at the top of that screen, see how you can narrow by service category, section, and keywords) and it cuts off at 500 results if your search is too broad. It helps to remember that once you click any section out of a particular manual - just pick one - you will be taken into that manual, which will have its entire contents as an expandable tree at the left, like this:



and if you're like me, that's a more comfortable way to read it. (But the search screen is really handy if you have specific keywords in mind and aren't sure where to find them.)

-Chap

 

Until and including 2006, any car purchase I made included the Service Manual/s. Since then I have only purchased Toyota with the option to buy hard copy for my 2010 Prius (only) at over $1,200...which I passed on. While arrangements and alternative agreements have since been made, I disagree with any justification not to make available the Manual/s or Disc/s for a one time purchase. The only reason I can see not to is to keep the customer on the Dealership Service TEET. A Chiltons cost what one day (or weekend) TIS cost, and if you do a full download as you pointed out, you loose function...and that it a lot of work for the average owner. Hell I bought a new lawn mower I got the service manual. In fact I am about to buy a new washer and drier and "already have" the Troubleshooting, Service and Parts manuals.

 

Excellent point, and that's a great way to set up online manuals because probably many "sub-procedures" are the same for different repairs.

As I understand it, copyright law allows you to make one copy for your personal use of any copyrighted material you own. I had a run-in with BMW North America over this. Back in the late 80's, I bought a BMW motorcycle from a local dealer, who promised to get me printed manuals for it, as I routinely got for the Hondas I had owned. The Haynes etc third party manuals were abbreviated and covered multiple models up to but not including mine. I waited and waited. What I didn't know was that BMW had converted all their manuals to microfiche. Surprise, motorcycle dealers lie just like car dealers do! Eventually I found a mail-order place that sold me the official BMW microfiche. At work, they were switching records over to computer so they had surplus microfiche readers stored away and let me have several. I was all set, except that microfiche can't be annotated like paper copies can. Sniffing around, I discovered that Canon made a "microfiche printer", a sort of copy machine, and the local Canon office told me that our law library had one (duh!), which I could pay to use. So I printed a copy of the whole manual for myself.

I was so overjoyed with this that I sent a letter describing my adventure to the BMW MC Owners Club magazine, and they printed it. A few weeks later I got a dire cease-and-desist-or-die letter from the BMW NA legal department. I phoned the Library of Congress, and they outlined the fair use doctrine described above. I wrote a barely-polite letter to BMW NA stating that they were welcome to sue me, they would certainly lose, and in return they could expect a countersuit for harassment (malicious prosecution?) and my legal expenses. And that treating a customer this way was inadvisable. No reply from them, certainly no apology. Soon thereafter I sold the BMW (for various reasons in addition to this experience) and went back to riding Hondas.

Certainly the technology exists for Toyota to sell a single-user subscription to their TIS. For example, I have an online subscription to the New York Times that allows me access from my iPad, not from my iPhone, and can't be shared with anybody else. Obviously it recognizes individual devices. Toyota might need to rearrange things to make a subscription apply only to a specific car model (or better yet VIN#) to prevent someone from mistakenly following a procedure that does not apply to their vehicle. Perhaps there is a way to block printing from such a subscription, or at least make printing cumbersome. A paper copy can be handy for annotation and referring to it while working, but as Chap points out you lose the hyperlinks and may be working from an outdated version.

It seems surprising to me that Toyota sells TIS subscriptions at all. Obviously they want to encourage owners to go to dealers for service, but beyond that there must be legal issues. If an owner follows (or claims to have followed) Toyota's procedure and, say, a wheel comes off and people die, won't Toyota be sued? Worse, suppose a customer follows a saved or paper copy of a procedure that has since been superseded, isn't the update in itself an implicit admission by Toyota that the original procedure was wrong?

I suspect that the subscriptions-for-sale is really intended for use by independent service garages working on Toyota vehicles. Toyota may be legally required to make service information available to independent garages and not just restrict it to Toyota dealers?

Probably too much conjecture on my part.

 

I sometimes speculate why the car companies "hide their light under a basket" with Shop Manuals. As often as not when reading some complex repair procedure, my reaction will be that it's way too tricky for me to take on, best left to the pros.

One thing, the complexity of cars of late has increased many-fold, maybe the all encompassing Shop Manual is becoming unwieldy.

Perhaps a compromise: they could publish and make reasonably cheaply available: the maintenance basics, half of which should have been included in the Owner's Manual anyway.

 

What I would really like to see them do is offer a single-vehicle, one-time-download option, different from a subscription. See, right now, when you sign up at two days for $15, that isn't just giving access to the docs on your own car ... for those two days, you have access to every freakin' thing on techinfo, you can fix all your friends' cars no matter what Toyota, Lexus, or Scion model or year they might be, read all the technical guides, even all the University of Toyota technician training course materials. It's a pretty awesome resource to think of having for $15.

But what if I don't want or need all that, but I'd really like to have the docs for my car and I'd like a way to sync them to my computer and use them offline, say when I break down away from network coverage, or techinfo is down for some reason on the very weekend I set aside to do a car project (that has happened to me, twice).

Maybe the price could be about the same. Take your choice: $15 for full library access for two days, or $15 one time with my VIN to get a legit download I'll be able to use offline. Maybe they'd want to go $30? It'd be well worth $30, and that's still low enough that getting a legit copy is an easy call and there wouldn't be a whole lot of profit motive to bootleg it.

But so far they haven't been consulting me on how to arrange their tech library.

-Chap

 

Same here......I have the answers to a lot of the world's problems......but nobody is asking.......

 

For my 08’ gen 2 before recently trading for the new 2017 Prius 2. I had a Bentley manual. Don,t know if they’re still published or how long it takes to cover a new model. These were pretty expensive at around $50.00 but were very comprehensive. Also pretty heavy and as thick as an Encyclopedia Britanica, but very good.

 

I pretty much encourage anyone who'll listen to just go straight to the horse's mouth at techinfo.toyota.com; the $15 isn't a whole lot of dough.

Some of those third party manuals can be sort of ok, and if you're working alone and don't mind struggling a little bit to straighten out what they got wrong, it's manageable. That was all I did myself as a HS/college-age fella, before I got my first factory manual and saw the difference.

It's kind of a bigger deal around a place like PriusChat where people are remotely trying to work together and solve problems, and sometimes a thread goes sideways because of some weird piece of misinformation that came out of some alternative manual but it's not obvious right away, because maybe somebody else assumed you were looking in the real manual when you weren't.

So it's just easier, when collaborating on PriusChat, when we can all know we're looking at the same info.

-Chap