5000 mile maintenance, did they change your oil?

I was just making fun of 487 point inspection. BUT WHY
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Ok Gang,

Here's a few screen caps stitched together of maintenance checklists going upto 95k for conditions for the Prime.

Yes the oil change at 5,000 does appear but only for "Dusty" "Short Trips" and "Idling". While this is not from the actual shop computer that the dealer uses, this comes from a very very reliable third party independent shop computer that get's their info from whatever the dealership is legally required to share with independent repair shops.

 

But, we know nothing about how much the engine is used. Forget the mileage on the car. How much was on the battery, and how much was on the engine? In our family use, we can easily run six days a week without running the engine, and about 20 miles a week of engine operation. Even when the battery shows no capacity, the energy flow diagrams show a lot of idling and running without engine operation.

Toyota could have easily provided a way to monitor engine usage, but they didn't. And, in most cases, except dusty, short trips, and idling, I have no problem with 10,000 mile oil drain intervals on non-hybrid cars. I've done it with great success for years.

 

I couldn't read those screen shots. Could you provide their source so I could print them?

 

How difficult would it be to install an engine hours meter?

 

I have a little coin-battery powered hour meter on my boat outboard motor. Clipped near the spark plugs wires, it detects when the motor runs (apparently detecting the EMF), and keeps a tally of the hours. Simple LCD readout.

Problem is, in the ten years I've had the boat, I've forgotten to replace the hour meter battery several times, at which point it goes dead. So that now I just change the oil once a year (4 stroke Yamaha), regardless (we don't put many hours on the boat).

I might try this on my Prime for kicks. I expect to be changing the oil once a year, even though we only do about 10k miles a year, and I expect over 50% of those to be EV. I could record the hours on the meter at each oil change, and replace the coin battery at that time (if I remember!).

It would be interesting to track those hours vs. miles driven and the stats in the car's trip computer.

Thinking about this further, and looking more carefully at the car's stats displays, can't we roughly deduce 'engine miles'? My Prime has 3100 miles on it, and the overall EV% was 51%. Doesn't that mean 0.51*3100 = 1581 were EV miles, and therefore 1519 miles were in hybrid mode? Now the engine does not run for some portion of the miles in hybrid mode, but that would still seem to give a pretty good indication of how much the engine has been used. (I am assuming motor-off miles in hybrid mode do not contribute to Toyota's calculation of EV%.)

 

This would work for the gen4, but would be inaccurate for Prime, because the Prime display programming is using the plain old hybrid's for the EV portion metric. On the hybrid, the EV percent is the time/distance that the ICE isn't running. Since no changes where made to the software for the Prime, the EV% includes the time the engine was off while in HV mode.

For tracking miles that the engine ran for the purpose of oil change interval length, it will work. For trying to determine how many of the car's miles where powered by grid energy, it is useless.

 

i put around 3,000 hv miles on my pip each year, but still change the oil and filter every spring. cheap insurance, especially considering there's basically no other maintenance for a long time.

 

Sorry but the source is a subscription only automotive shop database system (Mitchell). Here's some individual screen caps of the maintenance checklist. The top section shows regular maintenance, the bottom shows what else is supposed to be done in Dusty, Idling and Short Trip conditions.

If you really want to force an "included" oil change, just tell your service adviser that you idle like at least a couple of hours every day, I guess with the air conditioning on all the time. Then again, unless you actually fall into those categories, you don't really need the oil change before 10k (total miles) for these cars. Honestly, i'd put money down that engine oil might actually even be good at 15k (total miles).

I'm planning to do a Blackstone oil analysis on my first and second oil changes just to extinguish that curiosity.