One of Four Power Locks Malfunctioning

[magneto99]

I own a 2003 Prius and whenever I go to unlock the doors, the front rightside door does not unlock. All of the other doors unlock fine. I even see the unresponsive lock twitch a little bit when I press the unlock button. This is also true when I go to lock the doors. All three of the other doors work fine, but that one door is unresponsive.

Does anybody know what the problem is and if I can fix it myself?

Thanks!

[Tideland Prius]

Hi and welcome to PriusChat!

Hmm, could it be a bad rotor?

[eagle33199]

There's a number of possible problems... it could be a bad rotor, somehting could have broken off and be getting in the way... fairly difficult to tell.

If it were me, i would remove the door panel and see what i could see... but thats a bit hard to do from a thousand miles away :-p.

[silentak1]

I had the same problem in my previous car. I replaced the ACTUATOR and everything worked again. Cheap replacement part (<$50)

edit: thanks htmlspinnr

[HTMLSpinnr]

Actuator is the word you're looking for. There's (at least) two types of power locks in most modern cars. Solenoid and motorized. The Prius has the former. Generally the solenoids become weaker with age (or the connections become loose), eventually causing the lock to operate more slowly, incompletely, or not at all.

It would seem that solenoid types would be cheaper to replace due to less complexity. I've had past cars w/ motorized locks (Contour) and I dreaded the idea of one of those going. Could be worse, I had a 1976 Mercedez with vacuum operated locks - fixing those were a nightmare as you had to track down the vacuum leak on one to fix all of the locks, and they barely worked in the cold for some reason. :-(.

[vincent1449p]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(magneto99 @ Oct 23 2006, 10:37 AM) [snapback]336597[/snapback]</div>

I own a 2003 Prius and whenever I go to unlock the doors, the front rightside door does not unlock. All of the other doors unlock fine. I even see the unresponsive lock twitch a little bit when I press the unlock button. This is also true when I go to lock the doors. All three of the other doors work fine, but that one door is unresponsive.[/b]

I second eagle33199 of removing the door panel.

If you have a voltmeter, you can measure terminal 5 & 6 of the Door Lock Motor. For lock operation, you should observe 10V~14V at terminal 6. Similarly for unlock operation, you should see 10V~14V at terminal 5. If you don't get the specified voltages, check the wire harness. If the voltages are correct, replace the door lock assembly. HTH.