10K service before or after a moderate-long drive?

How many miles do those Tahoe trips total up to?
Nothing against you but it really amazes me how many people dump north of $30K on a car and then scrimp on an oil change. If it were me I'd change oil at 5K. Cheap insurance.

 

You are only 300 miles away from the 10K mark. It probably won't matter much if you do it before the trip or after the trip, but if I were you, I would get serviced before the trip and have everything checked-up. At 10K, there should not be anything to worry about, but top-up wiper fluid and visually inspecting brake in addition to oil and lube would be a good thing. If you have not done it yet, you could swap to winter tires for the winter trips too. Most of them are covered under the free Toyota Care, but winter tires will be on you.

 

Then do what @Salamander_King said.

 

Since you're asking the question, I suspect you already know the answer you want to hear. Clearly you want the peace of mind of having fresh oil/filter for your upcoming trips. If you're following Toyota's service schedule, the 5K service did not include an oil/filter change anyway, so you might as well get it done sooner instead of later.

 

If it's going to be thousands of miles over the 10k mark if waiting after, I'd do it before. That is with a non-plug in. If the miles are mostly EV, I'd have no worry waiting.

The synthetic motor oil blends used in cars now are more resistant to degrading. They aren't going to stop doing their lubricating job in the time frame of even an extended oil change. The real reason to change them is to replenish the additives and protectorants that get used up, and those are only getting used when the engine is running. The oil in the PP is the same oil Toyota puts in a non-plug in with an engine running for the full 10k miles. The Prime's oil is going to have more of those consumable additives left in its oil at the 10k mile mark than those.

Cheap to you. Doubling the number of oil changes doesn't just double the amount of materials coming out of the ground. It doubles the amount going into the waste stream, and increases the chance of leaks and spills on both sides. The environmental damage is greater than any hypothetical damage to the engine.

Early oil changes are detox regimens for cars.

 

I have the dealer do my maintenance. No cans of oil to dispose of. Used oil is recycled properly yada yada yada. $40 oil change and tire rotation plus the inspection and fluid topoffs. I don't loose sleep about destroying the environment.

 

My 5k service included an oil change. I was planning to ask since I had driven many short trips in HV (which qualifies as "severe"), but they did it without me asking.

 

For commercial uses, the oil change interval is based on the number of hours an engine is run. In a normal car it's easy to equate X miles to X hours of use and come in somewhere close. In a PHEV like the prime, you may have oil that has barely 1 hour of use in a year.

I'm using a good synthetic oil and changing on a schedule of once a year or 10,000 mile of freeway driving, whichever comes first. If I have not driven any long distance during that year, I might extend it to a year and a half if that's convenient. As said above, the oil breaks down from heat and age along with combustion byproducts that contaminate the oil.

 

Would be great if Toyota adopted an oil monitor like GM and Honda have in their cars. The systems calculate an oil wear estimate from the engine's actual running conditions and ambient temperatures. My ICE GMs would call for a change in the 7000 to 7500 mile range. A Volt mostly doing EV miles can go two years between changes.