2008 Prius maintenance questions

1. Yes

You should avoid spending large sums of money on your car until you determine how much oil this car is using. Check every couple weeks until you figure this out.

 

do you not follow the recommended maintenance schedule in your o/m?

 

Think I know the answer but anyway: how often do you check the oil level?

If the oil pressure light comes on it was likely well below the bottom mark on dipstick.

As @JC91006 says, start monitoring, see what you're dealing with.

 

You should stick with the cheaper oils, do not use synthetic. Only reason that was brought up was to get more money from you.

An engine that burns oil, you would want it to burn the cheap stuff

 

1. Is it possible I caused any permanent damage for driving on low oil for a few hundred miles?
Yes. It is always possible.
2. Can a service center detect any possible effects from this?
Yes, they may. They also may not.
3. What are the pros/cons of synthetic oil?
Synthetic is better oil, but pricier. You are out of warranty in any case, so more frequent changes with cheaper oil may be best. Especially as you seem to be losing oil, why lose the good stuff.
3. Today's oil change was done at a Firestone and while they didn't do a formal inspection, they sent me home with a list of repairs they said I needed from passive observation or guesses based on my age/mileage:
-replace poly rib belt
-replace cabin air filter
-replace spark plugs
-Clean fuel system
-replace shocks and struts
-alignment

https://www.toyota.com/t3Portal/document/omms-s/T-MMS-08Prius/pdf/T-MMS-08Prius.pdf
Serpentine belt after 60,000 miles inspect every 15,000 miles until it needs replacement.
Cabin Air filter replace every 30,000 miles
Spark plugs replaceevery 120,000 miles
Clean Fuel System if you must, just buy a can of Tecron.
Shocks, struts, and alinement depend on the speed you hit bumps, not miles. It is not unreasonable.

 

still worth taking a look. for instance, plugs get changed every 120k. you can plug the vin into the toyota owners website, and hopefully get some historical maintenance records.

 

The US Toyota maintenance booklet is frustrating, in that it doesn't include a maintenance chart, summarizing what's in those visit-by-visit descriptions. With a chart you can see the patterns at a glance, and extrapolate the maintenance for cars beyond the limit covered in the booklet.

You can make one yourself: either by hand or in a spreadsheet. Also look around the world for chart format, Australia for example. Though their service intervals are a bit different, and there's some oddities, gas filter change is required, for example.

 

$3400? That is crazy.

There's no need to replace anything you have there. No ac belt either

 

Never heard of those going bad on a prius

With high mileage on your car and oil burning issues, you shouldn't be spending anything on this car until it actually breaks.

Just keep topping off the oil

 

Mistiming an oil change is not a serious problem, but driving with the oil so low that you lose oil pressure is. Just understand that these are two different things. One is relatively harmless, the other potentially devastating to your engine. I go one or two thousand km over my normal oil change interval every now and then, but because I top off my oil I have never ran low.

The main benefit of synthetic oil is that it degrades a bit slower than conventional oil so it potentially allows for longer oil change intervals. It does not however reduce your oil consumption, and in some cases may make it slightly higher. Synthetic oil probably wouldn't have helped you with you low oil incident.

Regarding the maintenance, I totally agree with JC91006. At this point you really don't know how much damage you have done to the engine, so don't put too much money into it right now. Keep using whatever oil you've previously been using and watch it VERY closely for a while. You need to establish your base line oil consumption, this will give you some indication of what kind of shape the engine is in (and bear in mind that this can increase with high speed freeway driving).

After driving with low oil pressure you might find that the rate of oil consumption is now increased, so check it every few hundred miles (every tank of gas), at least for a while until you see how it's travelling. If you find that the engine is still ok then look into replacement of transmission fluid, spark plugs and serpentine belt (aka "fan belt"). None of these are expensive items, probably under $500 all up, but check in here with other US members to get a realistic estimate of what you should be paying.