Why hybrid actually need shorter oil change intervals

For gen 3, Toyota Canada said every 8k kms (~5k miles) or 6 months, and Toyota USA said 10k miles or 12 months, whichever comes first. Same engine.

For the excusers: 90% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the US border. And there's North Dakota, oh, and Alaska.

Short trips ARE bad: I try to avoid them as much as possible. We're only driving maybe once a week, typically at least 50 km, sometimes closer to a 100. We'll let the major shopping build-up, and try to catch it on the same day as the lengthy drive.

I'm changing the oil on ours once a year now, due to mostly to our extremely low, yearly use, only about 3k kms on average now. Car lives on a battery maintainer too, lol.

 

If you don't take your car on at least a few 100 mile round trip runs a month - I would concur. This is no different than grandma driving her ICE to church every Sunday on a 3 mile round trip. Those looking for a low mileage older car beware!!! If they have the maintenance records; pay attention to how often (dates) the service was done. If they're a couple of years apart, you know what happened. While everything was done at the proper mileage interval; the time interval was ignored. Check the date codes on those tires and your canned foods lately???

 

When I had Prius:

• Late Spring - gets winter condensed stuff out
• Late Autumn- gets summer dust and stuff out

Bob Wilson

 

with low mileage, i did mine every spring

 

Mine gets 5k miles oil and 30k miles coolant. It's not so much mileage or time; it's not about additives wearing out; it's oil contamination issues.

 

Yep, short engine run times will fuel soak your oil - that's why you need to do a long freeway run, ICE on for at least 20 minutes consistently to burn that out. Note: the motor will shut-off on the highway, when you coast.