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.

 

We had a string of Hondas over the decades, and I invariably shelled out about $100 CDN for the Honda Shop Manual, purchased through Helm Inc. They were city phone book sized tomes, thin paper, very well written, clear illustrations.

Just doing a single valve clearance adjustment recouped the investment: dealership would charge $300~400 for that procedure.

Now, at least from Toyota, everything’s online, $ub$cription-ba$ed, illustrations are screen-grabs from a model, and the writing’s “slipped”, to put it politely.

 

I assume you mean the PDF file with 7595 pages, with the troubleshooting details missing for most of the HV system codes, and the SRS/airbag section that really is for gen 2? That's the same one I've got.

I salute the efforts of the people who clicked "Print to PDF" as many times as that took, even if they still missed things, and merged in the wrong airbag section. It's handy to have, and lets me quickly look up most questions that don't involve something it's missing. If I need something it's missing, or need to check whether there's been an update, then I re-up my TIS subscription and check online.

Can you clarify what made you think so? The one clear benefit from Toyota's full transition to online for the manuals is how much it reduces the cost and hassle of updating. Naturally, what gets updated online isn't going to magically appear in our PDF copies.

As one example, if you look up the customer satisfaction program and accompanying TSB for gen 3 inverter failures, you'll see that the TSB directs the technician to follow the repair manual instructions for replacing the internal inverter components. Then you'll look in your PDF repair manual and not find any instructions for that—only for replacing the inverter altogether. The whole subsections on internal repair are newer than that. You find them right where they belong in the online version, though.

Also, as I've mentioned, the very few times I've used the online form to report an error in a repair manual, they've replied to me very promptly about fixing it. They don't care that I'm a nobody or not a dealer tech or whatever, if I found an error (and they check and say yup, look at that, he's right) they fix it.

In the US, the exact terms under which you get access to the manuals under TIS can be matched up like hand-to-glove with what the US (read: Massachusetts) right-to-repair law requires. I assume that the terms of your toyota-tech.eu site (which are slightly different from the US terms; for example, you guys get an extra-cheap partial-day rate, while our cheapest is two days) are similarly matched to what EU law requires. If the law required less, they'd be doing less, and if the law required more, they'd be doing more. It's as if the company was answering to shareholders rather than philanthropists.

That suggests that one promising way to push for better options from the companies would be to push for those options with the folks who write the laws.

You could advocate for such improvements with the Swedish or EU legislators. Here in the US, the outlook seems bleak for the time being: if you breathe the idea that some regulation on corporate conduct could serve the public interest, you get called a communist and probably get death threats, and even the existing law you wanted to improve probably gets gutted or repealed. There have been windows for improvement in RtR laws in the past, and there might be such windows in the future, but right now does not seem to be one in the US.

A professional organization I belong to has recently gone open-access with all its journals.

That didn't happen overnight; it's been in discussion for years, there were some incremental steps along the way, and a lot of careful thought about how to keep the lights on and the paychecks to the people who get paychecks. Seems to have happened without raising member dues, which is nice.

It may have helped that the organization is non-profit, and answers not to shareholders but to members, and is filled with members, like me, who think open access is good.

That doesn't mean we totally believe in violating the rights of copyright holders who haven't come around to agreeing with us yet.