$900 lumbar support repair???

Hello.

First of all, thank you to the folks who make this forum such a great resource. I'm about to become a first-time Prius owner, and this place has been invaluable as I researched this purchase.

I'm hoping that folks here can offer me some good advice/tips on a problem. (And please forgive me if I'm posting in the wrong forum. )

The car that I'm (scheduled to) buy on Wednesday is a 2010 Prius 4 with 48K miles. It's in good shape, one owner, dealer-maintained, all the records, etc. The problem is that the motorized lumbar support is malfunctioning...and because of my back issues, this feature is important to me. Much more important than the satellite radio and other bells and whistles the car comes with.

At my request, the owner took it to their Toyota dealer today. $100 in diagnosing fees later, they were told that the gears in the support mechanism are shot (they make a terrible grinding noise, and the support doesn't expand as it is supposed to) -- and that it will cost $900 (!) to repair it.

Ack.

I'm not sure what options I have for fixing this. Would it be cheaper to just buy and install a replacement seat? Any ideas of how much those might run? (I'm a bit scared to look for a salvage seat since I'd be concerned that the airbag might not be good.)

Any ideas or suggestions would be very welcomed....

Thanks!

 

Thanks for responding.

Yeah, I will probably do something like that, but I'd first like to figure out if there is a way to fix this problem for less than $900... No point in having either the seller or me take so big a hit if it can be avoided.

 

Thanks for the link. I've tried a number of products in the past but one of the things that appealed to me about the higher-end Prius seat is the ease of changing the amount of lumbar support on-the-fly. I find that my back's needs can be different from day to day (or hour to hour). Though not as convenient as the push-button ease of the Prius seat, I guess it is possible that one of the inflatables on your site might be a bit more versatile than the fixed supports I've used. I'll can certainly look into that.

Still, my ideal would be to find a way to get a Prius seat that works. The seat was really the primary reason I even considered getting a Four. Though this car seems to otherwise a good deal for a Four (they were asking $16.5), I'm wondering now if I should just pass on it. If I'm going to have to jerry-rig a lumbar support, I could probably do that in a Three or a Two and not be paying for other features that I don't really need.

Does anyone know if one can install a Four/Five driver seat in a Two or a Three and still have the features work? I've been assuming you can't, or Toyota would have made the leather seats an upgrade option for the lower trim models, right?

 

Thanks for the concern, feedback and sharing your first-hand experience.

After I test-drove this particular Prius and discovered the malfunctioning support, I went to a dealer to go sit in a 2013 that had the lumbar feature so that I could see what it was *supposed* to be like and whether it was worth pushing the owner to see about getting the seat fixed. Yes, it was pretty firm, but it seemed comfortable to me. Of course, I was not sitting in the car the whole day... It never occurred to me that you could rent a car from the dealer! The closest I was able to do was to borrow a friend's 2006 for a day, and although it only had the basic, cloth seats, it was still SO much more *adjustable* and comfortable than the seats in my current car (an old '91 Honda CRX HF that still gets about 42-48 mpg...but kills my back regardless of the positioning aids I've tried) that I decided to go ahead and find a Prius.

I'll make some phone calls today to inquire about salvage seat availability/cost. Even if I decide not to actually make the modification on this car, it would be good to go into my final negotiations with the owner knowing what it would cost.

 

Well, I'm now the proud owner of a new-to-me 2010 Prius IV.

Unfortunately, in the time frame I had to work with, I was unable to get a good alternative quote on a repair, or even on a replacement seat. But the seller came down a bit in price and I decided to go for it and trust that I'll be able to figure out the rest later.

I may even decide to poke around in the upholstery myself to see if I (or a mechanical genius friend of mine) can figure out a way to fix or replace the gear in the mechanism that sounds like it isn't engaging properly. We'll see.

I found one non-dealer repair shop that was willing to take a look at the seat and give me another estimate, although they didn't sound hopeful that it would be much cheaper for them to do the work; they said that while their labor is cheaper than the dealer, they apparently can't get the parts for the same price the dealer can. In fact, they said they can't even order replacement seat because Toyota will only sell them individual seat components, and then they'd have to put a seat together! (Huh?) And, ironically, the component list they have from Toyota didn't include the lumbar support mechanism.

I called a few salvage yards to see about getting a salvage seat, but no one has one right now. I was also advised by the guy in the shop above-mentioned shop that a salvage seat might not be a good idea because of the risk of a non-working airbag. He said that they would have no way to know the airbag wasn't working until they had purchased and installed the seat -- which I'd have to pay for even if they had to pull the seat back out again. And that if the airbag sensor indicates that the airbag is no good, it turns off ALL the airbags in the car. (Huh again? Really? You can't just disable one of the airbag sensors? Really?)

For now, I'm going to try the seat as is, and using inspiration (thanks JMD!) from both this


and the thermarest lumbar pillow (which I read about elsewhere on the chat), I'm going to start experimenting with using my blood-pressure cuff as a lumbar support and see if the adjustable pressure from that does the trick.

Thanks again for the feedback.

 

Hmmm. Looks like the site edited out the link I'd included in that post? I was trying to link to the healthyback dot com site that JMD had recommended. It has a couple of inflatable supports which, rather than just being static blow-up pillows, instead use a one-handed bulb-pump/valve combo (like blood pressure cuffs have) so that you can easily change the amount of air on-the-fly. (For those who are curious, one is called the "Companion Portable Neck and Back Support", and the other is the "Flexor Pro Active Back Support".)

Seems to me that kind of easily-adjustible inflatable could approximate what the motorized support does...and for a lot less than $900.

I'll report back again after I've done a bit of experimenting.