Prius 2015 maintenance manual

The Repair Manual published by Toyota for the 2015 Prius (RM25M0U) is available by subscription to techinfo.toyota.com; there is no printed version available. The text and illustrations are also in the ChiltonLibrary online service, to which many public libraries provide free access for anyone with a library card.

 

+1 on the Toyota Repair Manual.

I was 24 when I first tried buying a factory manual for a car I had. Haven't looked back. Up until then, I had not realized how much time I was wasting and incomplete information I was getting with the aftermarket books.

-Chap

 

AllDataDIY.com sells subscriptions to repair info. ~$30 for a year or ~$50 for 5 years. You can find coupon codes, but if you click away before you purchase, they will usually pop up a 10% discount. They are very helpful, very similar to the factory information (usually, YMMV--I have it for my 2004 and a Ford hybrid, the Ford info seems more complete, both appear to be the information from the factory service guides, but not as complete). Most posts here recommend signing up for TIS on a Friday morning (or better yet, before a 3-day weekend) because the "2-day" subscription is 2 business days (again, YMMV) and then download all of the PDFs. But then they are not indexed or linked, so very hard to navigate. One member here was working on a way to index and link them, I wonder how that is going...

 

I think they are migrating the "shop manual" inexorably to online-only? There's pros-and-cons to this.

A family member has just acquired a Mazda, and I was pleasantly surprised to see for all their vehicles there's an official repair manual available online. I would say it's a little "light", but still very extensive. And free to the general public. Kudos to Mazda for this.

Mazda CX-5 Service & Repair Manual

 

Well, that's a bit of a slanty way to put it. The Toyota techinfo manuals are very thoroughly indexed and linked—and they are not, in general, PDFs that you just download; they are very standard formats for the web, html for the text and usually png for the images. The wiring diagrams use a lot of svg. Some of the content is PDF, like service bulletins and warranty announcements, the technician training courses, and older manuals that were in printed form first and then put on techinfo.

What most people are doing when they "download all of the PDFs" is they are signing in and clicking through the whole manual and clicking "Print to file" over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, and ending up with a PDF of a bunch of print images of html pages where the links no longer work, and then saying "curses! this manual isn't indexed or linked!"

A more promising approach might be to not lose the original indexing and linking in the first place.

There is one giant PDF copy of a Gen 3 repair manual bouncing around on the web somewhere that was apparently a group effort to download from techinfo (the "print to PDF" pages end up with your name in the page footer every so many pages, and this one has multiple people's names, not to mention different sections rendered with different fonts and spacing) and has all the sections just glommed together in no discernible order in one 7k+ page PDF with all the links dead. That sucker is certainly hard to navigate, but that's not the fault of the originals on techinfo.

-Chap

 

With pdf format that was destined to be printed, a lot more care was (necessarily) applied to making the manual organized, straight-forward. This is evident comparing 2nd and 3rd gen pdf format manuals: the second gen manual was better presented, better descriptions/overviews, better illustrations.

 

Maybe another way of saying that is "a lot more care was (necessarily) applied to making the manual linear."

The newer ones definitely do rely on hyperlinking more. If you're trying to remove the framistat and that requires defresnibulating the flugen wheel first, the new section on the framistat will just have a step that says "Defresnibulate flugen wheel INFO" where the INFO is a hyperlink, 'cause there's already a section on that.

Of course that makes the new format suffer relatively more if you print-to-file it all into a PDF with the links killed.

-Chap

 

Indeed. The 2015 edition of the Repair Manual has about 2,800 topic pages, 6,200 illustrations, and 14,900 links, in the version published in English for the U.S. and Canada.

The Repair Manual is still available in PDF, but only for Prius model years 2005 and earlier. Even these are not a single PDF document per year; the 2004 edition (RM1075U), for example, runs to nearly 4,200 pages in over 1,300 separate files.

 

I'm happy with my solution, I hang out here (Free), I subscribe to AllDataDIY (<$10/year, and I assume that Toyota is paid for the use of their material) for instant access to indexed information, and if I need more detailed info, I can always get the $20 subscription to TIS or pay $65 and get access to TIS and TechStream for the two days.

 

My (paper) 06 Honda Civic Hybrid Manual doesn't repeat much, just sends to a referenced page number (old school "hyperlink", and hey: it works).

It IS awash in acronyms, and no back page table of what they all mean: each I'd assume is spelled out in full SOMEWHERE in the manual, but this is no help when you're stuck. There are often paragraphs that are so acronym riddled that I'm completely asea.

 

Some example. Main page of second gen manual, front brakes:



(Well titled, well illustrated, very complete.)

And third gen:



(Title is "ILLUSTRATION", not very illuminating, to put it politely. The "illustrations" are more diminutive/sketchy, fewer components noted. More and more, you get the sense they're "mailing it in". Pads, and shims: they need another page for that. Ditto for the caliper.)

 

I dun‍no, not sure it seems like a huge drop in their documentation mojo to go from showing 28 components in one illustration here



to showing 30 components in two immediately consecutive illustrations here




(I see the component count went up by two because the design of the pad support plates changed.)

They may have decided breaking it into two made them less squinty when viewed on a laptop screen, which of course is now the format they primarily design for.

As for the title, it seems like you're picking on another shortcoming of the massive print-to-PDF version that's going around the webs. As you're viewing TIS in your browser, you never need the actual content window to be redundantly telling you what you're looking at, because the contents pane on the left is telling you, and the window title is telling you. None of that is in the massive PDF thing, of course, which does (combined with the sections glommed together in no discernible order) make it extra hard to know where you are in the manual ... you have to sort of study what you're looking at, and then infer from that what section it is. But that's not Toyota's fault, it's just the way that unofficial printed-to-PDF thing was made.

(To the next person thinking of doing a massive print-to-file of a TIS manual, I'd like to suggest tweaking your browser settings to include at least the window title in the page headings first. And please, print them in the order of the table of contents pane, not the ranked-search-results list! )

-Chap

 

For the fourth-generation Prius (2016 and later), Toyota changed the illustration style from line art to renderings. Most text is now in separate tables, so the text is searchable and the images don’t have to be localized. For example:

 

That's pretty. Are the renderings still png, or are they using something else like svg?

How long until the first "I bought new parts from the dealer, and I opened the box and they weren't blue" post?

-Chap

 

The images (other than a handful used by the stylesheet) are all in PNG format. As far as I know, SVG is used only in the EWD Viewer.

 

That reminds me of a fabricator I worked for: some of their drawings were "conventional" AutoDesk AutoCAD, but they were transitioning into AutoDesk Inventor, where everything was modelled, either a part or an assembly, sometimes both. There were immense strides in efficiency/accuracy/completeness, but there was something maddening about the presentation, very terse, awkward. Hard to explain.

I was mainly checking, and my first drawing package was a shim pack "assembly". Page one was the assembly, with basically a picture of a square, and a bill of material listing the "parts", individual shims. There were then part drawings for each shim, each with a square, and identical description, apart from quantity and thickness.

Checking it was akin to old-school cartooning, flipping through reams of pages, lol.

 

Where do you find this manual?
Does it also cover the 4th gen v?

 

Fourth gen drawrings seems that they have drawn car completely in 3D CAD and extracted spareparts from there, what makes sense.

Spoiler: Autocad Inventor

I have been using Autodesk Inventor last 6 years and gotta say that it has been super easy to make sparepart lists from machines what i have designed first in separate parts and assembled the machine. Assembled machine can then be extracted to sparepart list with complete part numbers etc from invidual parts.

 

See the PriusChat Wiki page: Toyota Service Information and Where To Find It.

As far as know, there was only one generation of Prius v cars, model years 2012–2018, which were all derivatives of the third-generation liftback Prius.

The Prius v manuals are separate; for a 2016 Prius v built for sale in the U.S., see Repair Manual RM27Q0U, New Car Features NM27Q0U, Electrical Wiring Diagram EM27Q0U, and Body Repair Manual BM27Q0U.