Should I get head gasket replaced?

Have you had the cold engine startup shaking (engine misfires) or check engine light come on for the engine misfire trouble codes C0300, C0301, C0302, etc?

Make sure that you do not have an external coolant leak somewhere that is causing the level to go down.

The second thing I would do is replace the engine water pump since you have seen the red overheat temperature light come on twice. Use new coolant when it gets filled up. Overheating the engine can cause the head gasket to blow.

If the engine coolant continues to go down and you get engine misfire trouble codes, it is probably time for the head gasket to be replaced.

The hybrid battery can last from 10 to 15 years from what I have read. You can get an estimate for the health of your hybrid battery by using a Bluetooth OBD2 scanner and the Dr. Prius app on your phone or tablet.

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You can change the motor and the transmission for that price to a JDM spec low mileage takeout from the Japan domestic market I wouldn't even fool with head gaskets and rebuilding The rest of the work fine whatever you have in this thread hubs or something I don't know

 

Do you know how the independent shop determined that you need a new head gasket?

1. Did they remove the spark plugs and do a leak down test?
2. Did they remove the spark plugs and use a scope to examine the tops of the pistons to see if any looked like they were "steam cleaned"?
3. Did they pressure test the cooling system?

It is possible that your water pump is intermittently not working correctly. When the pump stops circulating coolant, the engine overheats, and coolant is forced out of the plastic bottle. There is a small overflow nipple near the cap. Do you see any evidence of dried pink at the rear side of the plastic bottle? Below is a picture I took of my plastic coolant bottle, which has a small black rubber cap on the overflow nipple. Do you still have the black rubber cap on yours?




So, maybe you are loosing coolant from the plastic bottle, and you do not have a blown head gasket yet! Wouldn't that be nice.

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Below is a picture from a Gen 3 thread about engine overheating/coolant loss and possible water pump failure. Notice the dried white/pink in the picture. The overflow nipple is shown in the red circle.



Here is the link to the tread that I grabbed the picture from:
Help! Prius overheating light and losing coolant!! | PriusChat

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It's a generation 3 You won't be guaranteed any of that this is where you get into the real crapshoot of car ownership seriously. At this point if this is an early situation and you can pretty much get a guarantee that nobody sees anything else or thinks anything else which critical thinking is hard to find a lot of times in the industry seriously. They're taking your vehicle to places that want your business so that you can pay them to do whatever to whatever it is you own car house products whatever there's a lot of competition in the market right now exorbit prices all of it. So let that all bounce around in your mind think about it for a while do you want somebody wrenching on something that already has close to 200,000 miles on it a few years ago that car would have been considered expired and ready to go to salvage but not today we all know why only because of dollars quality hasn't hugely gone up in these products manufacturing has changed but it hasn't made quality a whole lot better. In my eyes anyway. So I'm looking to get an engine that's not been run on American soil with about a third or less of the mileage I'm going to find in the States at LKQ at Tampa hybrid or wherever anybody in the States that's doing this work is rebuilding engines that are already here in the States been abused by Americans on American roads generally speaking not trying to be ugly I'm just saying things are a little different here slightly different things going on. We take care of things much differently here than people do in lots of other places. So I'm going with the low mileage takeout from the Japan domestic market and it's going to cost me less money than playing around with the whole lot of shops here spending a whole lot of hours working on possibly bad metal cracked pieces all of this kind of stuff that are really tough to see if you really don't want to look for them and just want to get paid for wrenching. People are hungry and they're looking to do work and charge lots of money for it and get paid and that's about it in a lot of instances so I take this to heart when I'm figuring out what to do with the big ticket item that I need everyday like my car in my house. Nobody's been over to work on my house in 35 years I just don't allow it I do it myself and I have friends and we all get together and do it ourselves or whatever because we know better and we have pretty nice decent homes that we have no money in essentially.

 

The plastic empeller cracks and swells and rubs against the side of the wall
so it won't turn as fast, or at all. You can buy just the empeller. But if it's been
doing this for a while, it's probably better to replace the whole pump.

Every car will need something at some time. The Pruis is no different.
That is why you have a savings plan where you put money aside for car repairs.
If you can learn to do alot of the work yourself, that's money you won't have to pay some
one else.

If you can replace the head gasket yourself, you won't pay for the labor.
If you can't do it, then it costs more. Think about how much a new(er) car will cost....

 

Yes, a block test would confirm a bad head gasket or a cracked block. I was looking at the possibility that you did not have a bad head gasket. It is strange that you do not have the cold engine startup shaking that is typical for a bad head gasket.

Like you said, no one can predict the future problems that you may have with your car if you get the head gasket replaced. Personally, I would not spend the money fixing a 2012 car that has 170k miles. I would trade it in for a new or newer car.

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JDM engine keep driving .. when it needs a battery take care of that too just part of it or if you really think that $2,100 is going to carry you real far and another vehicle go for it no one's going to hold you up matter of fact if you sell it the right time you'll get a premium for your 170K broke car. Plopping 3K In the thing with a super low mileage engine and transmission you should be good for a long time I would think.

 

I would recommend you clean the full EGR system, before getting the car back on the road, and repeat every 50K miles thereafter. See top two links in my signature.

 

Fix the head gasket with someone who is local and works on priuses and avoid the dealer. There's plenty of prius specialty shops that would do it for $1500-2000 plus whatever fees (maybe...I see you are in San Francisco so whatever the local inflation rate gets you to). Get them to clean the egr system at the same time and/or replace the egr cooler and you will be good to go along with some new spark plugs. The batteries are about $2500 for the PN from toyota so one day in the future you could replace it and expect another decade as well. They really aren't bad vehicles. Keep up on cleaning the egr system to avoid head gasket failures.