Techstream EGR Valve Blockage Data

Most of the downloaded versions going around, people have made by clicking Print to PDF lots and lots of times in the online manual. The blue [INFO] buttons that, in the manual, are cross-reference links to more detailed procedures, end up in the PDF as blue [INFO] boxes that don't do anything.

The details at the target of the link will still be present somewhere in the PDF (assuming it's complete), and can usually be found by doing a search in your PDF viewer for the exact string of text preceding the [INFO] button. (It will be one of the hits, with the rest being all the other places there's an [INFO] button referring to the same place.)

That's assuming the PDF is complete, which it might not be; people clicking Print to PDF hundreds of times can easily miss some.

The Repair Manual is written that way. It pretty much assumes you've studied the New Car Features Manual, which is also available the same way, and primes you in the basics of what the different systems and pieces are, what they do, and how they work. The Repair Manual makes more sense then.

Also, if you've looked at the New Car Features manual and you're still not totally feeling like a Toyota trained tech, don't ignore the Quick Technical Guides that are also there, and the entire library of "University of Toyota" technician training course materials. If you're signed in to TIS (or its Euro version) for access to the manuals, you also have all of that at your fingertips.

I don't know how much time you've spent looking at the New Car Features Manual or the Repair Manual, but I think your preconception here that they are written to keep you in the dark would be hard for you to support with examples representatively drawn from those sources.

While you might be able to find several dozen pages (out of several thousand) in the Repair Manual where one or maybe three specific details have been replaced with "TMC's intellectual property", that leaves a vast amount of material where they have been very forthcoming about what is what, what it does, and how it does it, often with simplified schematics and theory of operation.

For the fraction of details where they do fall back on "TMC's intellectual property", I suspect they are thinking less about keeping "normal people" in the dark, and more about that detail revealing to a competitor what solution they came up with to some tricky problem. I've not often run across a "TMC's intellectual property" detail that prevented me understanding or diagnosing the car at the level I need.

Seems to me the idea that they're out to "assure normal people don’t know anything about the science / structure behind any system" is easier to believe before actually looking at what they provide.

Unless you think they knowingly falsify what they put in the manuals.

In 18 years, I can think of about 3 times I have found an error in a Toyota manual. They have a form on the TIS website for reporting those. They reply promptly by email, and fix them. (PDF copies already floating around, of course, don't get fixed.)

 

Yeah, it helps that Toyota is quite consistent, using the same letter-by-letter descriptions.

 

So much to quote and reply here to @ChapmanF self assured reasoning, unfortunately I don’t have the time to retort to it all, and will keep it short.

I do have the entire 7500 pages of the G3 repair manual since purchase. You can never know what other people know. It’s the internet.

Toyotas instructions and repair manual are written once, at the time of release of the car. That is not the definition of any objective science concept. It’s Toyotas wishes and hopes.

Any new information are never/very rarely updated officially in any docs - they are issued as TSB.

And this is for desperate issues, risking potential very costly full recalls, if that kind of regulation exist in your country of origin.

Since you apparently work with this, it's very natural you rarely seek the repair manual.

That is unlikely the average priuschat user background. Could we agree?

 

That is indeed just the worst kind of ”restricted sharing”/piracy and should always be condemned. Creating any profit for yourself makes it all void.

However, the general official concept from Toyota of demanding payment and restricting access to repair manuals seem very much in line of the same reasoning as those pirates….

This is a dying concept.