Head Gasket Woes at a Toyota Dealer's Service Desk

Good topic!

(Plenty of time still to fix the spelling "woes", in the title and body...)

 

Fixing it, though, would deprive readers of the pleasure of humming "Froggy Went a-Courtin'" while reading the post.

 

Car mAnufCtures will win by asking the only one question, was the car under the mileage warranty or age in warranty. If it blew out of warranty then your sol.

 

You always have one ace up your sleeve, maybe not that significant, but provides some solace: next time you’re cutting a big check, you can put someone else’s name as payee, say Mazda, Subaru, someone else than the last weasel, lol.

In the interim, learn from others woes: clean the EGR, oil catch can doesn’t hurt, and change oil every 5k for good measure.

 

unfortunately, ones as bad as the other. and we drive toyotas because overall, they have been better historically.
not in every last detail, but overall

 

Too, I think the longer you hold and tinker on one particular vehicle, and hang out on a site like this, where you can see all the car’s foibles reported by the early adopters with higher miles, and do the preventative measures…

 

Careful there. Subaru has a very hard-earned reputation for lousy head gaskets. The EJ-series DOHC engine would pop combustion to coolant pretty easily. Paid the bill for one myself, saw zillions of others.

So they went back to the drawing board and revised the engine into the SOHC version. That one's head gaskets would just leak coolant out onto the pavement; no breach to combustion. They'd just drain you down to steam so you could have a regular overheat.

The good news is that now that they have the FA & FB series engines out on the street, they don't seem to have head gasket drama anymore. It just took them two generations of body styles to get there; more than ten calendar years.

I haven't caught up on Mazda yet, not sure what to expect.

But I'm just cracking up seeing you offer up Subaru as an alternative to a Prius in the context of a head gasket problem.

Remember: everything used to be even less reliable, and quite a lot of the competition isn't any better.

 

Upcoming CX-70 PHEV looks interesting.

Still, I’ve a hunch it’ll be significant time before we budge from our current 2010 hatchback Prius; very comfortable with it, foibles an’ all. Well maintained, thanks to hanging out here, all I’ve learned. Low miles too, we’re tapering off the automotive habit I guess.

 

I've never done one, but I can't imagine a head gasket replacement on a Subaru boxer engine being a very enjoyable job....

 

Opposing pistons, down low? Like a Beemer bike??

 

Like a Beemer bike, tightly installed in a bathtub?

 

Honestly an HG job in the average Subaru is not awful for the average shop. I think it's about 10 hours book time.

Now... it's more than triple that if you don't hoist the engine out and do the rest on an engine stand.

The bigger point is that head gasket failures in the Prius are hardly an isolated thing. It happens to lots and lots of cars, including ones you'd never think would have such a problem.

 

3rd gen has had more than it's share though? Regularly, around 150~200K miles? If the EGR cleanout is neglected?

My 2 cents, it''s an ongoing issue, there's a specific reason it's happening, and Toyota's run for cover.

If a class action lawsuit ever gets going, this might come back to bite them:

 

So, reading the document right there in your photo ... in the paragraph above your yellow highlight, I see a very specific condition described:

a rough idle and/or tapping noise from the HV transaxle at cold start due to a sticking EGR valve due to excess carbon buildup
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So, whether your highlighted text comes back to bite them or not depends on whether or not a majority of vehicles experience that specific condition.

I am, at the moment, trying (without success) to remember many (any?) post(s) here about a vehicle experiencing that specific condition, or where somebody went into their EGR system and found that specific condition to be present. Presumably it has happened sometimes, enough for Toyota to have issued that TSB. But I just don't think most people have been finding their EGR valves to be sticking, as that TSB describes.

You seem to be quietly swapping out the condition they're actually talking about for some condition you'd like them to be talking about, like the cooler often getting clogged, or like head gasket damage that you believe to be related to the cooler getting clogged. But that's a condition you're talking about, not the condition they're talking about.

 

That's true. It's the elephant in the room too, regardless of codes and cold-start shaking, head gaskets are failing with tedious regularity. And waiting for the codes and cold-start shaking, what they stipulate as prerequisite for intervention, you're screwed.

 

I can't remember any---in contrast to the large number of head gasket woes reported. I wonder whether the supposedly sticking EGR valve was a warped description of the same phenomenon you've termed "mashed ski-jump" syndrome.