Lifted Prius: Bigger tires vs strut spring seat

It looks like you could play without a little bit That's not going to affect your alignment If I'm not mistaken there's also a hole that's like cast into the spring perch the bottom one that's welded to the strut You might fit a pry bar right in that and tried to bend up and see if you can make the clearance happen I don't think you'd have to necessarily break down the spring and the top plate and all of that You're just trying to bend it up a little bit You could also take the wheel off with the car jacked up obviously. And then take something like a 2x4 or 4x4 a piece of steel pipe with a little jig on the end of it that'll kind of hold on to the lip of the strut and gently hammer up on it a little bit. If it comes to breaking the whole thing down then well you're taking the whole assembly apart now's the time to think possibly about coilovers because with two knurled rings you can raise and lower the car as you want for snow and mud and the like and then turning the two neural rings when you get back to the street if you so desire and you're back at your street setting. Another guy did very similar things with Pontiac vibe and matrix suspension pieces I believe they give you this lift especially an XR all wheel drive or whatever the version is may give you this clearance just by mounting those strut and spring assemblies they're all choices. Me personally I generally look to coilovers when I want the most suspension adjustability that I can have I had no idea that camping and off-roading was a big thing in the Prius but people have been doing it with a little small all-wheel drive station wagons for some time so they make some of those in the XR AWD type setups and their suspensions tend to match all of that XR AWD type of activity they sit up higher off the ground have bigger wider tires so on and so forth similar to the truck market. You've bypassed all this by doing your own thing which is great and now you'll have to make arrangements to do your own thing with the tall tires the close lower perch and all of that. And good luck

 

Like Tombukt2 said, it probably won't affect your alignment, but while any attempt to bend the spring perch might work for a while, the spring being compressed more on one side means it will be inclined to pop itself out. And that will strand you, even if it doesn't damage anything else.

225/55/17 is a super common and affordable size, why don't you just buy a set of snow tires off Craiglist and put them on your other rims? Then you would be safe driving in the snow, and you'd still have the taller profile you want. Your account says "socal" so I'm not sure how often you might be driving in snow (if you mean Big Bear for example you might see snow all the time). But if you plan to need them more than once just get some studless snow tires - you can drive on them all winter.

Coilovers is another option, but I can't speak to how much more clearance it might give.

 

On my crap coilovers that I bought for an AE111 Corolla looks like they'll give me two two and a half inches on the upside and on the lowering side about 1 and 7/8 it depends how far the threaded collar goes up and down the tube assembly but usually that's seemingly what they're looking like from the aftermarket