Brakes Every 2 Years...What's Going On?

Same shop each time? Real Toyota parts?

 

Time aside, how fast are you piling on the miles?

if you read carefully through Toyota USA’s Warranty and Maintenance Booklet, every 30k miles (or tri-yearly, whichever comes first) they omit the mention of brake “visual” inspection, instead talk about checking rotor specs.

Very vague, but I’d take that to mean do a full brake inspection at that interval, ie: lifting off the caliper, inspecting/cleaning and reliving.

Still, the more popular approach with a lot of owners is to just ignore the brakes, till you’re hearing noises, feeling a pulsation in the pedal, spongy feel, and so on.

 

Our Brake rotors tend to accumulate surface rust due to limited use. I periodically get my Prius up to 30 MPH, turn off the regenerative braking (shift to neutral) and lightly apply the brakes to clean the rotors (repeat until brake noise goes away). The other brake maintenance items are to lubricate the caliper slide pins and check the water absorption level of the brake fluid every two years.

I have never had to do a brake job in 22 years of driving Prii.

JeffD

 

I've had to do two break services for my GMCs over the last 30 years - each of those at about the 150,000 mile mark but that's only one data point.

If you're having to do brake service as often as you describe you 'may' not be a horrible driver....
You 'may' not live in a horribly congested urban hellscape where you're locked in traffic jams for hours every day.....
You 'may' not drive a horrible car or have it serviced by 'horrible' technicians....
You 'may' not live in an unimaginably horrible climate where local victims have to salt and sand the roads every few years.....

HOWEVER (comma!)
I will submit that your brake wear is abnormally high, and you 'may' be doing SOMETHING to contribute to it - especially as a 10k per year driver.

You drive a G4 which makes things easy - the next time you need brake work use OEM parts or spend a little bit more money and 'white sheet' all four corners at a place like Midas that will "back their brake parts (shoes, pads) with a Golden Guarantee limited lifetime warranty, meaning the parts are covered for as long as you own your car...." - or so they claim.

At the very least you will earn the right for them to explain to you WHY your brakes start vibrating afterwards if this winds up being the case. Many if not most tire shops also do brakes and some of the better of these will offer a better guarantee than a place like Midas whose guarantees can be sketch.


-Good Luck!

 

That's your rotors warping; most likely due to inferior materials and/or mismatched pads and rotor materials.

I would do what @ETC(SS) stated; Find a local tire and brake shop that will give you a lifetime warranty on the brake job. You'll pay a little more, but your already out $1K per axle over the last 4 years. I've actually had customers that literally drove with one foot on the brake pedal - and their brakes lasted longer than that.

Good Luck....

 

I remember a Car Care Nut video where he warned against using non Toyota parts for the brakes because it resulted in the exact consequences you describe. FWTW

 

I was about to start by asking for more details on what the "excessive vibration" feels like.

A warped rotor is a classic cause of vibration, a classic kind of vibration whose frequency goes with the wheel speed. In conventional cars, you'd often feel it as a pulsation in the pedal. The Prius brake system has enough electronic control between the pedal and the brakes to normally mask that pedal pulsation. The gen 3 repair manual suggests a trick of unplugging the pedal stroke sensor before a test drive, which disables enough of the electronic control that you will then feel the pedal pulsate if a disc is warped.

I don't know if the same trick applies in gen 4. If it doesn't, or if you just want to verify warping the sure-fire way, that always works:



But there are other kinds of feeling that a person might call 'vibration'. The usual Prius rotor-surface-rust quirk is just a scrapey sound when it's mild, but when it's not as mild it's a roughness or grabbiness you can feel.

If that fits the description of the vibration, then that's a very well-known Prius recurring issue that is simple to deal with, by just making your next few normal stops in neutral, which disables regen and ensures enough brake pressure is used to wipe the surface rust off. You probably already knew about that, with this not being your first Prius.

If you came in with that condition to a Toyota dealer, you'd expect them to know about that and teach you about making some stops in neutral to clear it up. At an independent shop, they might be less likely to know that piece of Prius trivia.

But we even had a report eleven years ago where an actual Toyota dealer (who definitely should know better!) just kept happily taking $xxx to $xxxx each time from a near-retirement customer every time she came in with that condition, sending her back with "new factory brakes" each time.

 

The kind of dial indicator shown in that drawing is not very expensive at places like Harbor Freight, and would be an easy way to be sure whether a warped rotor is or isn't the problem, and if so, which one(s).

 

I've got over 50K miles on mine and do a lot of mountain driving in the Sierras. No issues and my 2012 Prius C; just shy of 100K miles when totaled out was still on it's original OEM set-up. Same driving conditions, though the Prime handles the Sierras much better than the buzzy Prius C.

 

Someone else reported repeatedly needing new gen 4 brakes awhile back.
I forget the outcome, but I think it was road salt.
Might have been poor material quality

 

That makes sense; but dragging the brakes for a few yards will usually take care of that.

This doesn't prevent unscrupulous mechanics from selling you a full brake job for something that's normal......

 

What have the shops reported each time?
Did they show you the problem?
Are you car savvy?

 

I don't do it on any kind of fixed schedule, just whenever it's needed. You can easily hear (and, in more advanced cases, feel) when it's needed.

Sometimes it won't be once in a month. Sometimes it'll be multiple times in a week. Depends what the weather's done. Just listen.

 

The real question is how did it feel after the last two aftermarket replacements? Good for a while?

1. Use OEM pads and rotors
The aftermarket rotors an independent shop provide makes them money and warp fast. You can buy parts from an online Toyota dealer and get quality at a discount; more so during sales like the upcoming autoparts.hoovertoyota.com June 8-22 event. You have to shop for the best final price in the cart, some also do free shipping.

2. Driving habits
This means anticipating stops and letting off early except for emergencies.. Too much pedal early operates the brakes early. Too much brake builds heat and warps aftermarket rotors.

Case in point:
2012 v new rear pads at 300,000 miles due to a concurrent wheel bearing. At 350,000 miles new front pads because after 14 years the pads were barely legal. New oem pads. All four original rotors remain.