The first sign was a grinding hum, then nothing. Tina had pressed the button on the key fob in the Hy-Vee parking lot in early May, the passenger sliding door moved about four inches, made a noise like a coffee grinder full of gravel, and stopped. She had to pull it the rest of the way by hand with a bag of groceries on her hip.
For the next two months, that was how the door worked. The Sienna has a main switch for the power sliding doors on the dash, and with it off the doors slide manually, just heavily. Lainey learned to give it a hip check. Volleyball teammates learned to wait for an adult. Everybody had an opinion about it.
What was actually wrong
Power sliding doors on this generation of Sienna are pulled open and shut by a cable that wraps around a drum on a motor, which sits behind the interior trim panel at the rear of the door opening. Over time, the cable frays or comes apart from its end fittings, and it starts to bunch up on the drum. That's the grinding. The motor itself is usually fine. I learned all of this the long way, by watching three different repair videos, two of which disagreed with each other on the order of steps.
The dealer's quote for a new motor and cable assembly was well over $1,000 installed. The shop was more reasonable but still several hundred dollars, because it's a lot of labor for trim removal. A replacement cable and drum kit for our van was $86 online, and the reviews were full of people who had done it in a driveway. We'd also just paid $1,140 for an air conditioning compressor in June, so I was motivated.
The Saturday
I did it on July 5, in the garage, with the van at a little under 192,000 miles. Before I took off a single piece of trim, I disconnected the negative battery terminal and waited a few minutes. There are side curtain airbags in the roof rails of this van, and the trim pieces near them are not the place to be poking around with a live electrical system. That step isn't optional for me.
Here's roughly how it went:
- Remove the rear quarter trim on the passenger side, which involves about a dozen plastic clips, two screws hidden under covers, and the seat belt anchor bolt.
- Unbolt the motor assembly and unhook the cable ends from the door's hinge roller arm.
- Pull the whole motor and drum assembly out of the body, which is a little like getting a ship out of a bottle.
- Swap the old cable and drum for the new kit on the bench, making sure the cable is wound the way the instructions show.
- Reverse it all, reconnect the cable ends, bolt the motor back in, and reconnect the battery.
The bench part took 20 minutes. Getting the motor out and back in took most of the afternoon. My hands are not shaped for the gap they expect you to reach through. I broke two of the trim clips, which is apparently normal, and bought a bag of 50 replacement clips for $7 that I've decided not to count against the $86 because I'll be using them for the next decade.
Does it work?
It does. After reconnecting the battery, the door needed to be cycled by hand once fully open and fully closed so the system could relearn its limits. Then I flipped the switch on the dash back to on and pressed the button, and the door glided open and shut like it was 2011. Tina pressed the fob from the kitchen window three times to make sure. Lainey said, "Finally," and walked off.
Some honest caveats. If your door motor itself is bad, or the problem is in the wiring that runs through the door track, this kit won't fix it, and that's a job I'd take to the shop because it gets into the electrical side. If your door is coming off its track or the roller is broken, that's a different repair. And if you're not comfortable working around airbag components, this is a reasonable place to pay someone, even at several hundred dollars.
The cost comparison is about as lopsided as anything I've done. I spent $86 plus about five hours. That works out to a decent wage for an afternoon, and we got our van door back. It also means the van, at nearly 192,000 miles, is now a little more likely to stay in the family for a few more years, which was always the plan.
The notebook entry reads: "7/5. Pass. sliding door cable. $86. Works. Do not lose the clip bag." Tina has already found the clip bag in the kitchen junk drawer, so we're off to a good start.