Cost of Dealer Replacement of Power Steering System

Get 2 or 3 dealership quotes? Are there independent shops that might do it too?

Attachment is from the 2006 Repair Manual, not sure how relevant it is to 2004, but might help.

 

It's a fools errand to take a 15 year old car in need of basic repairs to a car dealership, or as we more often refer to them as car stealerships.

These places are not where you go for car repairs unless you bought a car from them brand new and it's still under warranty! Car dealerships are warranty repair specialists that the car manufacturer is billed for under negotiated terms at scale. What's worse the dealers don't make very much money selling cars or doing warranty repairs, so they charge ridiculous prices on parts. For example, a replacement power inverter for a Prius used parts dealer cost me $75, my local Toyota Dealership for that same part: $4080, more than the value of the car that needed it!!!

When a hapless car owner takes an old car into a dealer they get fleeced... A women I know in Seattle took her 2006 Prius she had just purchased for $5K into a dealership with a hyrbid battery error code and they robbed her of $550 just to take apart the battery pack to look at it / diagnosis and then told her that it would be an additional $5,500 to repair the pack. Instead I did all the work repair for her and got her back on the road for $400!

For a simple power steering issue any reputable mechanic who's not a part of the stealership racket will have you back on the road in the $500 range depending on how much of a problem it is. And if you find a really good mechanic/friend of the family they'll give you options from least expensive fix long enough to sell it to most expensive fix to other option between those two extremes.

If you take your 2004 Prius into a dealership and let them know you want to sell it after you have it fixed they'll put a high pressure sales pitch on you and claim the same old "repairs cost more than value of the car" routine and offer your a seemingly too good to be true trade in offer on a new or slightly used car with a worthles $1500 warranty. My friends who used to work in this business all say it's very rare for people to say no if you get aggressive enough, even if they barely qualify for financing, if you pressure weak people enough they cave and if you have conscience, you don't last long in an operation like that.

If I were you and didn't have the time to do the work myself, I'd take the car into a non-corporate shop that specializes in doing alignment jobs. That way they'll be focused entirely on the problem of fixing the steering and will have the absolute minimum ulterior motives when it comes to the upsell. And yes there's always an upsell, even with me.