2011 Prius 2: Yet Another AC Compressor Failure

No longer a Toyota prospective customer myself. In fact I don’t recommend Prius to anyone who ask me about buying one.

 

1. The older a car gets, the less it matters whose emblem is on the front. At some point, a car gets old enough that it is just as much a product of its care, circumstances and custody as its design and materials. I’m not insinuating that you haven’t cared for it properly, just offering a reminder that nothing is forever, and age has disproportionately strong effects on sophisticated cars.

Here’s a comparative example: My 2006 Subaru was 8 years old when the air conditioner quit- roughly the same age as your car was when it had this problem. Does that mean that they are equally reliable? I’d say so. It looks like a tie, really. Now, it so happens that I was able to fix that air conditioner for less than $10. This does not change the relative reliability of the car, it was just cheaper to fix because it had a much simpler air conditioner.

Toyota sells simple cars too.

2. Your words and actions seem somewhat… dissonant.

You’ve just paid $3k to repair your car. That is a huge vote of confidence in the car. Some of that in Toyota the company, but also in this one specific Toyota. If you really had lost faith, you would have traded it in on something else. That was (and technically still is) an option.

 

If it serves to reassure you, think of me as just another middle aged schmo with bad knees and a mortgage.

I think I read your post too literally. You haven’t lost faith. Well- maybe a little, and I think some disappontment is natural when you find a big bill from any corner of your life.

Enjoy the cool breeze!

 

I agree with the part of your statement about reliability depending on maintenance and driving style and conditions more and more over time, but I also recall a Consumer Reports study of long-term reliability of different manufacturers over time based on their members’ repair histories. The chart eas clear-cut with Toyota and Honda clearly having more reliable cars than all other brands as the age of the vehicle extended out to 10 years, IIRC.
Also agree in general about the negative effect of complexity on reliability over time , but despite the truly horrendous complexity of the HSD and the associated interlinked computers and machinery in the Prius, they seem to be remarkably reliable on the whole so far (our 2012 hatchback certainly has been).

 

It seems easier to speak of the "horrendous complexity" of those things, if one discounts the complexity of what those things replace.

 

Fair enough: The Prius replaces my previous vehicles. My original automobiles were completely analog, with a make-and-break ignition with points where you changed the gap to a specific setting so that there was enough dwell time for the coil to build up an electrical field which then collapsed when the points opened, causing a large voltage in the secondary circuit of the coil to be distributed through a distributor cap to each spark plug. The timing was set by loosening a bolt and then physically rotating the aforesaid distributor cap whilst staring at tiny grooves on the flywheel illuminated by a strobe light triggered by the opening of those points.
The throttle linkage on the more modern carburetors at that time had a throttle linkage that would physically open a butterfly valve to increase airflow and the vacuum-operated diaphragm would pull up that tapered needle in a synchronized fashion to ensure a combustable air-fuel mixture.
Non-synchromesh “crash box” transmissions required double-clutching to correctly operate, but we’re charmingly simple to maintain and overhaul. Synchromesh was a bit more complex but still easy to inspect for condition and replace as required.
Every component of all vehicle systems was directly observable and testable. “Horrendous complexity” refers not only to the myriad of unseen and unknown digitally-operated electronic and physical devices in the Prius system, but also the fact that the controlling Toyota computer code is intentionally unknown. Thus we have unkown-unkowns, which makes the Prius orders of magnitude more complex than the cars I started working on.
I am not against this progress as I would much rather fly a “fly-by-wire” aircraft with EFIS displays than an analog “steam gauge” aircraft. I am simply amazed at how reliable Toyota has made a complex but really quite low-cost vehicle. (In comparison, digitally-controlled aircraft tend to be quite expensive so far.)

 

I suppose it comes down to one's perspective. I can imagine waiting ten more years or so, then floating a suggestion to remove the sensed crank position, direct ignition, fuel injection, permanently-meshed gears, two motors, and twelve transistor switches of the Prius, and put all that other gunk back in (presumably returning also to the sub-12,000-mile "tune-up" intervals all that gunk required as it wore and went out of whack).

And all the physical principles behind those "..."s could end up being a fair mouthful to explain to some young digital native who has probably already built stuff in school that worked with transistor switches and an Arduino or a Pi.

Software being proprietary ... yeah, not perfect. But for the most part, we know in pretty fair detail what it is doing. Specific parameters and algorithms we don't know. But the engineers didn't publish their design calculations behind those carburetor venturis and passages and vacuum diaphragms and centrifugal and vacuum distributor advance and hydraulic transmission valve bodies and so on, either.

And I'm not sure I'd buy in on how "easy" that stuff was to inspect. Before my first Prius, I did have a Bronco II with a manual, synchromesh transmission. It would have been easy to inspect if the aluminum had been transparent, but that was a detail the factory had overlooked. The ground clearance was high enough, at least, that I could get the transmission out in a matter of hours in the driveway if I had to, and disassembled on a bench in several more hours, using the specialized puller and press tools, to the tune of a few hundred dollars, that I had to obtain or improvise to be able to do so. A full inspection, checking the published tolerances, and reassembly with the right bearing preloads, could be done in a day or so, if the right shims were on hand. Then nothing left but putting it back in the truck.

 

And yet somehow these cars keep right on nailing top or near-top honors for used car reliability when broad market surveys are conducted.

Paradoxical? I think only because of our tendency to gloss over the different kinds of complexity and modes of failure of the old stuff that the new stuff replaces ... mostly because we're familiar with the old stuff.

 

I like to keep cars a long time and plan ahead myself. I've never gotten away with 20 years in one car though, so maybe my cycles are only half as long as yours.

My vaguely defined goal is to be on a "power by the hour" arrangement by the time I'm on fixed income. Ride shares or a bus pass in a city with good transit, something like that.

I think I'll wear out another car or 3 before then.

 

Why did they cover cost?
I am going through same thing today- called Toyota myself with no luck. They told me it was all on me to repair.

 

i'm old enough to remember when cars started having major repair costs around 60,000 miles

not to mention rust

 

Seriously. My first car was up for oil change & valve adjustment (thankfully only 8 valves) and 5 grease fittings every 3k, retiming the ignition every 6k, repacking the grease in the CV joints, changing plugs, points & condenser every 12k, repacking the wheel bearings every 30k…

I learned that it ran great if I got in there that often doing all of that. And it didn’t if I didn’t. Happy to get away with a lot more now.