Opening the hatch....just regular opening it....not from the inside

It looks like some body work was done on this Prius. The previous owner told me to be easy on the hatch but wasn't sure how extensive the damage was.

I went to pull the hatch up by the area above the license plate today (the piece of plastic with the toyota symbol on it and it broke off in my hands while at the store. I tried in vain to put the white plastic tabs back into the holes.

As a stop gap, I put some JB Weld Plastic Bonder on the tabs and holes. The plastic is all ripped in half leaving the remainder of the plastic on the body.

So how am I supposed to normally open the hatch from the outside? Do I just lightly press the button and pull up? Pulling up creates alot of stress in this rigged area. I tried to grab it from the bottom of the hatch but if not pulled the right way it ends up locking again and I have to push the hatch back down and start over.

Thanks for any input.

 

Thanks and yes....hatch garnish is where I am having trouble with. I have used JB weld plastic bonder after cleaning up with alcohol. If that fails, I will just get a used garnish on ebay. I had this issue with my Subaru Forster XT as well so familiar with it all unfortunately.

The hatch struts are squeaky and the hatch doesn't lift as easily as I'd like it to. Gotta wonder if this is an aggravating factor. Replacing the struts will give me an excuse to proactively seal the rest of the area that likes to leak water into the battery area.

 

Going to get an "overly aggressive" set that hopefully flies upwards once I press the button and give it a little bit of a pull.

 

Anyone know the torque specs for the hatch garnish? Snug and all that are not sufficient when trying to piece together a few broken parts.

This info would be super helpful!

 

Great pointers.

I swapped the struts out with the ones I linked to. I am as slow as the hills and that was one easy cheap job!

 

Sure....

Well the old ones sounded a bit creaky for starters. They were probably only worn to about an average amount of wear as far as the many vehicles I have owned. They had no difficulty holding the hatch up whatsoever and probably wouldn't for the next 3 years I would guess.

The hatch struts I linked to weren't as violent in lift as others mentioned during their reviews. I was almost hoping they would be as that would put even less load on the garnish.

Turns out these are just right. A little tight in closing the hatch but my wife can still close it with relative ease.