Which maintenance can be DIY versus dealer only?

There is no regular maintenance that would involve HV concerns.

Plugs, coolants, brakes, suspension, 12v battery etc.....have at it without worry.

 

What "repairs can only be done at a dealer due to safety/electric shock issues?"

Scarcely anything. It's a car. There are a few high voltage bits in it. All those bits use distinctive orange wiring in distinctive orange wire loom, with labels telling you if there's anything you should do or not do.

Except for the few things in the car that are orange or have high-voltage warnings, everything in there is maintainable.

Even the orange stuff is maintainable if you read up on the procedures and can follow safety instructions.

There are airbag bits too. Those use distinctive yellow wiring. No different there than in any other cars with airbags.

The braking system has a neat trick it does where it can share effort with the powertrain. But that doesn't change the brakes mechanically. The powertrain does what it does. The brakes do what they do. The sharing is the two controllers sending each other messages saying "I can do this much, you do that much". Mechanically, the brakes are pretty much like other modern cars with ABS, ECB, and VSC.

So much of the car is run by computers that you are at a real disadvantage if you don't have software (like Techstream) for talking to them. If you do, you're on Easy Street. Want to bleed the brakes? Tell Techstream. It takes control of the ABS valves and steps you through the whole process.

The repair manual and wiring diagrams, etc., are all available online. Elektroingenieur put together a good wiki page on that.

 

Everything can be DIY and this website has a huge amount of information to assist you if you get good at searching it. Just keep in mind that sometimes people post the wrong info and don't get corrected, but the more you learn, the easier it is to ignore the inaccurate posts.

 

The real danger of DIY maintenance on the Prius is that you discover how satisfying and easy it can be (given proper tools) and become so addicted to it that you don't want to do anything else.

I leave the brake flushes to the pros since I don't want to screw that up. (I know lots of you guys are comfortable with brakes. I might get that way if I had a coach for the 1st time or two. LOL!) And I don't have an alignment machine. For pretty much anything else, why would I pay someone to have my fun for me?

 

I use my computer, and at home is exactly where I do it.

 

I think any repair or maintenance can be done DIY, provided you have the means and knowledge to do such a task. For me, oil/filter change, tire rotation, fluid top-up, cabin and engine filter, and battery fan filter replacement are all easy enough to DIY. But, I don't particularly enjoy crawling under the car and getting greasy. If it can be done by a pro for a reasonable cost, I am all for letting a pro work on my car. A pro is not necessarily at a dealer, but in my area, the local Toyota dealer service dept is not much more expensive than regular independent mechanics for most of the services, so more often than not, I end up taking my car back to a dealer.

 

You can bleed your brakes yourself without Techstream.

 

What he's doing in that video is a brake fluid replacement, which is a little different from "bleeding", because the system is assumed already full of fluid and already bled, no air in it. He's just letting new fluid in to push old fluid out.

Because of that, the fact that he never did anything to the normal-service front brake circuit, but only to the fail-safe one that operates by manual pumping, isn't really a problem in a fluid replacement. There's a couple ounces of old fluid left in the normal-service hydraulic circuits, nothing really worth obsessing over. It would be different leaving air in there, though.

You could get away with using that procedure for "bleeding", if you had only opened up the very ends of lines at the calipers, and you were sure you didn't have any bubbles in the underhood components.