The yellow oil maintenance light apparently comes on after you drive 5,000 miles. But I am seeing people saying that you don’t actually need an oil change in the Prius until you hit 10,000 miles. So what’s the truth: when should we actually get our oil changed, when the maintenance light comes on or 5,000 miles after that?
It has alot to do with your driving conditions... In general newer engines and a full synthetic oil can go closer to 10K miles between changes and old engines with cheap regular motor oil can go a bit under 5k miles between changes. But keeping a close eye on what your oil looks like as it gets dirty and starts to deteriorate ought to be more important than what amount of miles is. Or at least once a year...
You would think there'd be some intelligence built into the car's recommendations. Throw a plug-in hybrid in the mix....
Your premise has a misunderstanding: it’s not an “oil maintenance light”, it’s an indication some maintenance needs doing, at least by the miles. Toyota USA designates what needs doing in the publication “Warranty and Maintenance Booklet”. Every new Toyota vehicle in the States will have this in the glove box, along with Owners Manual. If it’s missing you can download a pdf version, one source being Toyota Tech Info, under the Manuals tab. Toyota specs maintenance by miles or months, whichever comes first, which can render the in-dash, maintenance indicator somewhat pointless, especially with low usage where months exceed miles. Canadian spec Toyotas don’t have this indicator, life goes on. All that said, before the advent of gen 3 (commencing in model year 2010), the Toyota USA spec for engine oil and filter change was 5000 miles or 6 months, whichever comes first. Revising that to 10,000 miles or yearly is not what you’d call an incremental revision, and has met some scepticism. Doubly so with the low-friction piston rings Toyota employed with gen 3, till partway through model year 2014. There’s been a lot of reports of excessive oil consumption here, and prudent owners are sticking with 5k miles oil changes. One issue I found with the Toyota USA maintenance schedule, it’s humanly impossible to discern maintenance frequencies, due to the awkward format, that lists what should be done event-by-event. It almost certainly was developed in table format, say with miles/months columns and specific maintenance rows. Then for inexplicable reasons, dumbed-down to event-by-event format. Another issue is that the schedule stops at 120k miles or 12 years. Anyway, attached are a couple of Excel spreadsheets I’ve done, reverse-engineering Toyota USA’s schedule back to a more readable format, both as-is and extrapolated to 240k miles or 24 years. Plus pdf’s.
Supposedly, my MINI calculates the number of gallons that passes through the oil pump and lights the service light based on that and I think, oil temperatures. You'd think that with PHEV, and to a lesser extent HEV engines, Toyota could come up with something more applicable than miles or time. What if you plugged in you PHEV most of the time? Wasn't there a post of someone worried about his gasoline going bad, lol?
