have you considered renting a car for the trip? normally when we have a trip greater than 5 hours we just rent something. the first time we did this a young driver backed into our rental and it was replaced on the spot. if it had been our regular daily, we would have had to deal with a broken headlight, radiator, etc it's a little more money, but you can wad it up and walk away without having to deal with body shops, insurance, etc
While most people eventually get too old to be a bully. You're never too old to get bullied! And I'm sure you're not stealing little kid's cookies and crumbling them as much as you used to do, but...
we were thinking about it at first but with the cost of renting a car for 3 weeks, husband said he rather put that money into the cars maintenance.
ok cool. you'll probably want to do the normal stuff for maintenance. if I were setting up for a multi week road trip I would add road side towing, litho battery jump pack, tires (if they're more than half worn), oil change, wheel bearing /brakes / hg tests, oil analysis ($40), and a clear bra (vinyl) for the hood/front areas. a really good detail/ waxing will make cleanup after a lot easier. maybe change from liability to full insurance for the month ?
You should probably just go ahead and rebuild the engine while you're doing all this other recommended stuff....or better jest just get a new car...sounds like this one will never make it based on everything you're being told you need. wow
The egr cooler should be cleaned or replaced same as the intake manifold by 200K miles along with the pipe between the two. They will get clogged up. SM-G960U ?
Sounds like ya'll worry too much and are making a mountain out of a mole hill. Just do the simple basic maintenance and don't spend too much time or money on it and stay focused on enjoying your trip and everything will work out fine. These cars are amazingly reliable!
Maintenance RIGHT before a trip can backfire, if something gets screwed up. A week or two before is safer.
Or rather overly ambitious maintenance can backfire... As I said to a friend I met on Priuschat a year ago in a text message this weekend: "If you get a little stressed doing preventative maintenance before a road trip it makes it less likely you'll get super stressed needing repairs once you're out in the middle of nowhere."
Even if nothing's screwed up, if last minute maintenance "turns up" something, say pink crusties on a water pump, you're either going to be stressing for the whole trip, or delayed, waiting for parts.
Thanks everyone. We were mostly concerned that we will be hitting the 200k mark on our Prius a little before or during our road trip and wanting to do whatever maintenance is needed at 200k before we leave. We will be driving about 6k miles.
there's no such thing as critical maintenance. when a trip is going through one of the 5,000 mile maintenance intervals, you can do it before or after. a gotcha on a trip is going to be something unexpected, because most parts don't get replaced until they fail.
