Don’t Fear the Dashboard
A few weeks ago I was letting Eidan play in our new Prius, and I took my eyes off him for a few minutes - always a bad idea. He took the opportunity to stuff some change in the CD player. My first impulse was to pick up the car by the rear bumper and shake it, in order to get the change to fall out. But lacking the ability to turn into the Hulk - no matter how mad I am - I had to look for a different solution. I was worried that trying to play a CD might damage the player, so I called the dealership, and the guy I talked to agreed, and said they could take out the CD player (for about $100 worth of labor) and try to get the change out. That sounded like the least bad option, so Maria called later to make an appointment, and instead got an inquisition. “Who did you talk to? That’s wrong! We’ll have to remove the CD player and then ship it out to be fixed or replaced.” The whole thing was going to run $300 or $400.
So I decided to give it a try myself. Car stereo installation guys take out factory steroes all the time, right? First I opened the hood to disconnect the battery, to avoid any accidental shorts. I quickly discovered that “battery” is a bit of a different concept when it comes to a hybrid car. I didn’t see anything that remotely resembled any kind of car battery I’d ever seen since my high school motorhead days. Instead of being smart and looking it up, I decided to live dangerously and turned my attention to the dashboard. While it looked like it was composed of a set of discrete panels, it turned out they were all interlocked. That meant removing the center section (where the CD player is) required starting with the sections all the way on the edge of the driver’s side, and working my way across, resulting in my opening up pretty much the entire dashboard.
This is really not something I wanted to do to our brand new car. The force required to pull out the dash panels felt like it was just short of the level of force that would break them. The one that really had me scared at first was removing the touchscreen panel above the CD player, but it turned out to actually be easier than some of the others. I also had to keep an eye on the various sharp metal edges of the components inside the dash, to make sure I didn’t scratch any of the exterior surfaces on them as I moved things around.
It all worked out fine. It turns out the CD player had a good design, with a small well in the front, so that any small objects (like coins!) would fall in the well instead of getting jammed in the drive. I shook out 52 cents, which I gave to Kai, and then put everything back together. The whole venture took about an hour, and the CD player still worked fine. And it didn’t cost $300 
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Note: I found a number of people posting on various car forums with this same problem (apparently Eidan isn’t the only toddler who’s attracted to putting coins in CD players). I imagine it’s likely other Toyota cars have their dashboards put together in a similar fashion, but I can’t say for sure. Don’t try this yourself unless you are mechanically inclined - there are plenty of opportunities to accidentally damage things. If you do try it yourself, and you have a foreign car, be sure to have a metric socket wrench set handy.
