why only inspect everything with oil and filter changes only

What's the thing got for mileage pretty much I don't think you're going to mitigate the head gasket leak It's going to appear at some point It took my wife's car to 368,000 mi because it was pretty much kept under the perfect conditions for this car That's acceptable to me It happening at 140,000 is not acceptable in my Toyota world any kind of way. Our generation 3 or at least this one was kept on the road was bought at the beginning of the pandemic with the intention of DoorDash and all that delivery driver nonsense It stayed in the wind the whole pandemic and then some and that's in my eyes why it made the mileage it did I have another one a 2013 went about 160 and failed. So anyway there's always that I'm not sure you're going to skip that little incident at all unless your car is just going to be a garage queen and you hardly ever drive it and you'll sell it in a few years hardly a few more miles than when you bought it or some kind of conditions like that. I would say you want to change your CVT transmission fluid and you want to use some test strips probably to test your antifreeze and coolant in both the inverter and the engine and after the readings aren't correct go ahead and just change the Asian red coolant in both of those items brake fluid now dot four brake fluid will go a long time so in the $300,000 mi range is not unheard of nor is it excessive probably not going to cause any problems You don't even want to know what I use for brake fluid so there's always that I've got four cars here all above $300,000 with the factory original dot for brake fluid in at least two of them.

 

The CVT fluid will look pretty nasty You may be at the mileage where it's time to clean the EGR passageways there's a guy on here that has all the videos and step by step in his signature You can't miss it if that's really your goal to try and ward off head gasket failure this is one way that may help do that.

 

2011 with very low miles? I hope you got this from a reputable seller because after these cars turn 10 years old, their mileage usually gets turned back by bad actors and sold to unsuspecting buyers

 

What's the mileage?

 

$685 to clean the EGR system We should just go to a junkyard and buy the EGR cooler the pipe that goes from the cooler to the plastic intake manifold If you're going to do an EGR valve you should buy a remanufactured and/or new they're available both ways and then you can bolt those pieces on on a Saturday You would have maybe 50 to $100 in the pieces 35 or $40 to send them out to the machine shop to be tanked and cleaned so when you get them back they look new and that should get it Don't get carried away on this model If you make $240,000 mi bless yourself and run. If you don't once everything starts rattling and making a racket run save your money It's not worth dealing with not in my eyes Good luck.

 

You can go to Toyota.com and download the Owner’s Manual and the Maintenance Schedule for your car for free. That will give you Toyota’s recommended maintenance.
To answer your original question, the maintenance schedule does call for inspecting the fluids (and “inspecting” means actually testing the condition) such as coolants and the brake fluid. For the coolants it also calls for changing them at certain intervals: based on time or mileage, which ever comes first. However, if the inspections find that the coolant is deteriorating before that time/mileage interval, it should be changed sooner. The brake fluid should be changed when the inspections indicate it needs to be changed. The brake fluid inspection should look at moisture and copper content (which indicates corrosion is occurring).

 

One more bit of advice: check out The Car Care Nut on YouTube. He is a former Toyota Master Technician who has lots of good advice and videos that will help you make your own decisions based on educated facts rather than having to rely on other’s opinions.
Some of his videos even show you how to do some of the minor maintenance items. Look for the ones for the Generation 3 Prius.

 

As @Doug McC says, you can download a pdf of the Toyota USA Warranty and Maintenance Booklet, which has an event-by-event schedule of recommended maintenance. There's a couple of hitches with that though:

1. It's an event-by-event schedule. If you're trying to understand what needs doing, and how often, you pretty much have to reverse-engineer it, go through it page-by-page, note what they're saying to do, and compile a table format schedule. Which they probably started with... Anyway, I've done that, see attached.

2. Toyota USA's schedule has omissions worth considering: transaxle fluid change, brake fluid change, clarification of brake maintenance. And in light of the design shortfall of 3rd gen EGR: any mention of carbon clean-out of that system. See the following

My 2 cents:
The cold-knock symptom is due to coolant leaking past the head gasket, into the combustion chambers. Typically overnight, and starting with cylinder one. It's my hunch that periodic clean-out of the EGR system will prevent this from happening. My car, I'd do it every 50K miles. At the least, I wouldn't delay the first cleaning past 100K.

EGR stands for Exhaust Gas Recirculation. Toyota's engineers added this system to control combustion, and are counting on it to keep the engine temps in equilibrium. What been happening though, is the system, undoubtedly not tested enough, will slow-but-sure collect carbon, become ineffective. The last leg of the system also tends to clog up unevenly, clogging more so at cylinder one. Head gasket failure usually commences at this end as well.

Toyota has opted to "circle the wagons" on this one, leaving owners on their own.

See first two links in my signature for more info. On a phone turn it landscape to see signature.

That's a fair price. Presume you mean "I was given..."? Did they go into any details as to what they would do? Do they have any website info on the service?

Also, as others have asked: what's the miles on it?

 

In response to your original question: with 55k on your car you should have the coolants changed, the brake fluid changed, both based on the time interval.
Based on the 15k you mentioned in one of your posts, if you continue with regular oil changes you should be good for that duration. I wouldn’t worry about the EGR system at this point for the 15K, and neither would I be concerned about the transmission fluid, unless Toyota’s Maintenance Schedule for your car recommends it.

 

One more suggestion based on the advice that The Car Care Nut has given many times: if the car is running well and not giving any indication of problems, then do the preventative maintenance items (coolants, brake fluid, oil changes) and don’t run the risk of breaking something that isn’t broken.
The transmission fluid is sealed and is synthetic so it is basically lifetime fluid (unless someone has opened the case). Especially for your anticipated use.
Toyota doesn’t give a recommendation on WHEN to change the brake fluid because it is to be changed based on the inspection results.

 

That's Toyota USA. Toyota Canada does spec a months/miles interval:



This is from model year 2014. To be fair, they say nothing in my 2010 documentation. Then commencing with 2016 model year they say nothing, about any maintenance, in the documentation, moved it all online, and "improved" to the US event-by-event format.

Fuller excerpt attached, and yeah, this was the salad days of maintenance schedules for Toyota Canada, no chance of such a nice table format schedule, after 2016. One quibble with the attached schedule: trying to glean the oil/filter change interval trips everybody up; it is in-fact every 8000 kms or 6 months, but that is not readily apparent at first read.

 

A couple of hybrid pit employees (or part owners) post here. One is @RightOnTime; the other’s name escapes me. They may see this and post or private message you.@rjparker thinks highly of them too.

 

That sounds like a great idea and well worth the money. Relax. One of the problems with PriusChat is the “chicken little syndrome”: some people have some problems (often caused by improper preventative maintenance or some other owner failing) and it turns into “every car of that Generation has that problem”. When in reality a small percentage have.
Your vehicle has had just 2 owners in 13 years: not a bad record.

Nearly all of the 3rd Generation problems (if not all) are preventable by simple preventative maintenance steps starting with 6 months or 5K oil changes (WHICH EVER COMES FIRST!) and frequent coolant inspections and changing it when those inspections indicate the need, not waiting for some magical mileage point that doesn’t exist.
You are making good choices, the sky isn’t going to fall.