2010 Prius 12 volt battery compartment vent

My guess is when you were looking on parts.toyota.com, you never guessed to look for it on the drawing called "roof side ventilator".

Their catalog organization is really weird sometimes. You just have to keep thinking "ok, what would be on a Roof Side Ventilator drawing? I've never noticed any vents on the side of the roof..."

Japanese vs. English probably figures in there somewhere, too.

Quarter panel vent

 

The organization of Toyota’s Electronic Parts Catalog system comes directly from the printed and microfiche catalogs that it replaced, and at the time it was developed, the main users would have been trained parts sales personnel, rather than the public. I imagine consistency from model to model, and cost of preparation and revision, were considered more important than making it easy for a novice to find a specific part.

Having worked with spare parts catalogs for other complex machinery with many variations and optional features, I don’t find the Toyota system especially unusual, though I wish they’d bring the presentation on parts.toyota.com up to the standard of their EPC application that runs on Microsoft Windows.

There is only one list of catalog figure names, for all Toyota, Lexus, and Scion models—including unusual ones such as the Coaster bus and Mirai fuel cell vehicle. I believe until recently, the Japanese versions of the names could only contain katakana and rōmaji, but not kanji, due to encoding limitations. Figure 61-02, Roof Side Ventilator, is just ルーフ サイド ベンチレータ in Japanese; it’s still a bit strange, though, since there is also Figure 61-55, Rear Ventilator & Roof Ventilator (リヤ ベンチレータ & ルーフ ベンチレータ).

 

You have reminded me of a question that has long frustrated me when trying to use parts.toyota.com:

These figures clearly all have numeric designations like 61-02 or 61-55. These designations are not the path you follow on parts.toyota.com to find your way to a drawing. You have to do that by clicking through the somewhat vague names and unintuitive categories.

But those designations are still used in the drawings. So you can end up at a drawing that shows details of things near your thing, and has your thing in the corner without details, and a note saying for details of that thing, see drawing 46-02.

Which is the moment to pull the plug on the computer and go open a flower shop, because I've never found a way on parts.toyota.com to use the wretched numeric designation to pull up a drawing.

Do you know of a way?

 

No, that’s one of several regrettable deficiencies, especially since the figure cross-references are part of the image source data. SimplePart apparently chose not to make them work.

Those also seem to be SimplePart’s doing; in the Toyota system, all of the figures are in only four groups (Tool/Engine/Fuel, Power Train/Chassis, Body, and Electrical), and there are no subcategories.