OEM number part unicity

Most conventional cars are still hydraulic steering but your gen2 Prius is electric.

I believe the only replacement that includes the electric assist will be Toyota. To get a reduced oem price you would have to order it online from a Toyota dealer.

Any Toyota dealer will use your vin to supply the exact part which in some cases could vary over a production run, sometimes in the middle of the year.

Often the variance is an upgrade from the original which means casual googling can provide more than one part number. Again a Toyota dealer can tell when a part supercedes original or intermediate parts.

A shop gets a discount from local dealers so parts which require shipping to get a better price sometimes are not a great deal.

With that said it often pays to check with an online Toyota dealer.

 

The part that generally wears out is the manual rack assembly .tie rod ends etc . literal slip in the rack and slide assembly . The electric assist is above your knees sitting in car

 

It looks as if @Tideland Prius deleted the other thread and the responses that were on it instead of merging the threads, so I'll try to re-create my post from there here:

In my experience, there can be different part numbers that go with different trim/option levels for the car (for example, there may have been a trim level that came with larger wheels and different steering angles). I would be very cautious about assuming two part numbers are interchangeable because they both are listed.

I would want to confirm with a search by the Toyota dealer, or on a web site from Toyota itself, checked with the VIN of the car.

When you are looking on generic internet marketplaces like eBay and those others, the accuracy of whatever you see depends completely, usually, on whoever enters those listings. Often they have minimal knowledge of what they are selling, and they might have a part in hand that was salvaged, and list it under some number that they see physically marked on the part. That is risky because Toyota parts often have numbers physically marked on them that are not their part numbers. Or the person may have copy/pasted and edited a listing for something else. And so on.

I am not aware of any Prius generation ever coming with anything except electric-assisted steering. Any listings to the contrary would have to involve some mistake. It's not always easy to be sure what the mistake was. (Is it the right part, described incorrectly? or with the wrong picture? Or really the wrong part?)

I confess I don't know what a 'synchro bar' is, in the context of a steering rack.

With great care. I would want to start with a definitely-known-good part number confirmed with Toyota, and then be very careful sifting through generic marketplace listings for the part.

Here in North America, Toyota sometimes has inventory of parts they have remanufactured themselves. Last I knew, you could check for those by tacking -84 on to the end of the part number and searching for that. I would be fairly confident of a remanufactured part coming from Toyota.