2014 prius v eats oil only on road trips

I find high speed driving (>70) will often use oil. However the 2010-2014 models had a bad piston and ring design that causes much of the problem. The best thing to do is change the oil every 5k and watch the oil level frequently. Running it low can be bad. Also the egr cooler and passages get clogged up and should be cleaned thoroughly at least every 100k.

 

Sustained, high rpms will always consume more oil. I made a hurried trip to Boston a few years ago that consumed noticeably more oil than my normal driving does.

Pull the dipstick every fillup, and maybe carry a spare quart or two with you on those 4k+ trips. Don't let that light come on, ever.

 

how many miles on her?

 

definitely jump on the egr circuit asap

 

More info:

Bad Flywheel | PriusChat

 

Mostly ... check oil frequently, don't let it get low. Maybe drive a little more slowly on those long trips.

EGR ... ok, there's a popular school of thought here about that, go for it if you want. Or at least ask the car for its current EGR flow numbers and make a judgment.

Head gasket preemptively? "Piston sleeves"? Don't open a can of worms fixing what ain't broke. The cast-iron cylinder liners in the block (if that's what you meant by sleeves) are spiny, and nonreplaceable.

 

If you pull up the last test details like this:



you can see that the value has to be under 0.99 kPa to fail, and in this example the last test came out more than ten times that, so this car doesn't seem on the verge of failing the test any time soon. It's kind of a judgment call; what would be helpful would be if we had more people who would post their numbers from before cleaning and also post photos of what they found inside. That would help us all be better judges of what the numbers can tell us.

The value is in kPa, a pressure unit, because what the car is really measuring is how much the pressure in the intake manifold changed when the EGR valve was opened.

 

1.6 psi converts to around 11 kPa, looks about the same as mine. I haven't looked in my cooler, but the downstream pipes and manifold passages had about a paper-thin layer of carbon I scraped off.

 

Some shops, and many DIYers will use a 'mini-vci' cable (20 usd) with techstream (dealer technician software) installed on a windows device (or emulate such). There are higher quality cables that cost more and may enable additional features within techstream.

 

OP already has a scan tool that will retrieve the last value of the EGR flow test. It happens to show the value in psi rather than kilopascals, but that's just an easy conversion.

 

The scan tool shows the PSI min and max also.

Denver has the lower than 87 octane gas available? Hopefully not using that especially when going down to sea level?



moto g(7) power ?

 

I think I would prefer to convert the value it displays to kPa, and compare them to the kPa min and max shown in Techstream (which are constants, so they can be taken from the photo upthread if Techstream isn't handy), rather than comparing the psi values as shown.

Why? Well:

value = 1.6 psi = 11 kPa

11 kPa / 0.99 kPa min = test value about 11 times the minimum, looks pretty good

but

1.6 psi / 0.1 psi = test value looks 16 times the minimum (!), an overestimate.

Why does that happen? Rounding. The min 0.99 kPa is 0.144 psi but the tester is rounding that to 0.1, introducing an error of over 30%.

Also, when you look at the 'max' value in kPa, you see 655.35, which kind of shouts out (to anybody with a computing background, anyway) "we don't care about the max, this is just a min test". But converted to psi, the number 95 just isn't such an obvious tell.

 

Searched up this problem online. Got a possible cause as clogged PCV. Of course the poster mentioned (s)he changed it, but never came back to report the results...

moto g(7) power ?

 

Sounds like you need a new engine.
My v has 269,000 and uses one quart per 5000 miles and I drive it at 70 most of the time.
And I have replaced the head gasket. And I don't love my car.....