touring owners: check your rear struts

an interesting story, as they usually start out...

to make a long story short, DH had an 07 touring with some major suspension damage in the shop recently. he ordered a replacement rear strut for the touring edition. when he went to put it in... uh oh... it doesn't match! so he did some digging around and found out that this particular touring edition prius had the wrong struts on it! they were the smaller struts from the non-touring model.

sooo.... check your struts. here's how.

look under the car from the rear. on either side you will see where the strut tubes attach to the rear suspension beam. just above the attachment point are two painted bands on the strut tube. the TE prius has a pink stripe and a red stripe. the non-TE prius has a blue stripe and a red stripe (and are smaller, but if you've got nothing to compare to...)

from a random sampling on the lot of maybe 5 of each version, this paint scheme thing holds true. now if we get some non-matches, we'll have to tackle those as they come. all the ones he checked had the appropriate suspension parts on them. now if it changed along the line somewhere... he's not sure. he's never had reason to look at these before! well now he's gonna be looking at them. he is going to report this to toyota as well.

THANKS galaxee...

You continue to be a great source of accurate, informative posts on PriusChat.

Needless to say, I immediately took my flashlight and checked my '07 Touring and, sigh of relief, I have the correct Touring struts. Perhaps the Prius factory ran short of the Touring struts and substituted on the assembly line. Wonder how they passed inspection.


CIAO

Perhaps that is why some people either didn't notice the difference between the two versions or felt that even with the Touring edition they still needed the BT stiffener.

Thanks for this information galaxee. Thankfully, after checking mine out, they are correct.

Rear Strut Stripes: Touring Pink & Red / Standard Blue & Red

Pictures of the Touring Prius' rear strut with pink and red stripes can been seen in Post #19 of the following thread http://priuschat.com/forums/prius-main-forum/47917-consumer-reports-drives-touring-edition-2.html (although because of flash, the stripes appear white and pink), and note that the Touring rear springs are marked with blue paint:

[imglink]http://priuschat.com/forums/attachments/gen-ii-prius-main-forum/9510d1212092242-consumer-reports-drives-touring-edition-img_0939.jpg[/imglink]

In comparison, here's a photo of my Standard Prius' rear strut with the [light] blue and red stripes, and note that the Standard Prius' rear springs are marked with green paint:

The original equipment rear shocks on my 2004 have a white stripe and a pink stripe. I replaced them at 30K miles because the right rear shock was leaking fluid; however after removing them I could not detect any difference in the effort required to compress the new vs. the used shocks. So I saved the original shocks and they are still sitting in my garage.

The replacement shocks (sourced from a Toyota dealer parts dept) have no painted stripes on them.

Note that the shock at the top of the photo (which is the leaky one) has a gold-colored metal clamp holding the shock together, while the shock at the bottom has a silver-colored clamp. I think that clamp takes on a golden color as the shock begins to leak.

Thanks, Galaxee, for the heads-up. I checked my TE and I'm in the pink and red! Thanks for looking out for us all and translating for DH.

Lee

gotta go and check mine tomorrow thanx for the heads up !!!

From your picture, your 2004 rear shocks look like they have white and red (you say pink) stripes.

Now I'm thinking that the rear shocks of pre-2007 Standard Priuses (they were all Standard as the Touring came out in 2007) might have white and red stripes like your 2004.

So maybe the rear shocks striping scheme goes like this:

2004-2006 Prius: White & Red (or maybe [Light] Blue & Red) stripes.

2007-2008 Standard Prius: [Light] Blue & Red stripes.

2007-2008 Touring Prius: Pink & Red stripes.

Just checked, Pink and Red, bingo! Thanks Galaxee

More data points:
Brand new 2008 Touring,
Pink and Red stripes on struts,
two blue stripes on rear springs
one white stripe on rear sway bar.

mine are ok in my 2007.