Undercarriage body work costs?

Don't bother pop the clips out of the piece that's dragging the rest of the clips and use it to something to lie down on or throw it away or cut it up for recycling got a bunch of them half destroyed here and never make it back on the car The heat shield for the exhaust same thing nothing's going to burn up melt or otherwise happen . But if you must and that's just the way you are then you must look on eBay you'll find all those pieces of plastic made in a more durable PVC more flexible type of plastic than the Styrofoam or harder ABS like plastic that is there now that will crack if you bend it same with the fender liners as you crack those and bend them You can get units that are more PVC like You can bend them and fold them and all of that and they don't crack and break even with some age on them they are not factory pieces but they fit the factory car with the factory clip and they're more pliable.

 

A competent shop with lift shouldn’t ding you more than an hours labour, say $100 max.

if there’s any way you can safely get the car raised without professionals, you’ll have a much better chance of determining what needs replacement, and be able to do the work carefully/thoroughly.

I think the oil change link in my signature has tips on DIY raising and supporting the car, care of fasteners and so on. On a phone turn it landscape to see signatures.

I’m partial to floor jack and safety stands, but for simple underbody access a pair of ramps would be most expedient I think.

 

Internet search, ebay search, amazon search..... not that hard.

 

I grew up in Denver, so I know what it's like. What happens to the bottom of your car varies depending on how the city, your work, and shopping destinations are at clearing the streets you drive over.

Unfortunately, in our areas, repairing the body panels under the cars are just a fact of life. As the winter progresses, it makes me laugh at the amount of stuff that appears to be dragging under everyone's cars, SUVs, and even those big/bad pickup trucks. It's just not Prii, but the low ground clearance doesn't help. I also notice that as the year progresses, cars start dragging less and less until we get back to winter again. It's a fairly easy repair (if you have some basic auto repair tools).

This is the main reason why I started to do my own oil changes again. (I grew up doing them, but stopped because of the hassle, opting to let someone else do the work, deal with the mess.) When pieces started dragging on the ground and falling off in the winter, I decided that letting the shops change my oil was causing other problems. Like, how I couldn't back up in the winter and had to fix/replace the plastic panels in the spring. The oil change shops never seem to replace the plastic push pins that have broken or worn out. They just put them back in and send you on your way to catch and drag on anything that happens to be sticking up from the roadway, and they couldn't care less.

That Gen 3 oil change door design is the worst too. It just asks for problems. Buy extra plastic push pins so you have them when you need them. Some spare splash shield grommets (Part no 90189-06193), and what looks like wood screws (Part no 90159-60215 - I hope the missing screws aren't now stuck in someone's tires) also come in handy from time to time.

The aftermarket body panels are less expensive, seem thinner, are more flexible, and don't quite fit as well as the Toyota ones. I wouldn't expect the same life as the Toyota panels, but with the increased cost you could replace them more often.

 

It actually seems to me from our experience that the more flexible non Toyota panels they do not seem thinner. I'm standing over an aftermarket flexible driver side front fender liner and I'm taking out the one that came with the car which is a Toyota one it's busted up from things hitting it and all that It's like Styrofoam plastic very non-flexible type of stuff and it is very thin The PVC piece that I'm putting on is double the thickness All the holes seem to line up it'll be on the car in a minute and when stuff flaps around and smacks into this PVC light material it won't do nothing or anything to it I'm stabbing it with a pic that's made by husky It's like a screwdriver with a pointed end on it but it's not sharpened and it does nothing to it If I hit the Toyota piece which I just did it cracks and breaks and makes a long line of a crack in the material this PVC stuff I'd have to push really hard to do that to poke a hole in it while it's sitting on the ground in the dirt I would think these kinds of panels would do real well in the snow which I used to live in but that was 30 years before the Prius was invented.