So at just 35,688 miles I went to take this car to the park as I don't drive it as often as I would like, because it's short legroom causes leg/foot/nerve pain. And upon starting out, when the gas engine kicked in, it felt like a low rider car that bounces up and down. It was jerking around and just acting crazy. Never experienced anything like this before. When on electric motor, it was fine. Drove it around the block to see if it was just a rough start or something, but didn't help.
Had vehicle towed to the dealer and then got the call nobody wants to get. Apparently fuel injector 1 & 4 stuck open, and it did a cylinder wash of those, flooding the cylinders with fuel that then got into the oil. And the cylinders were scored.
Faced with a $13K-$15K repair cost to do a rebuilt/used engine with a lifetime warranty, or ditching the car, I asked if there was any other option. The service advisor said he could talk to Toyota and see if they'd assist in any way, after all it was very low mileage for such things AND there were no trouble lights/codes, and there was no previous indication of it doing this prior to failure. The engine and vehicle had been driven just a couple of days prior with zero indication of anything behing wrong.
Toyota agreed to pitch in the parts and I would pay the labor, for a total cost of $7009.04 on my end, which also included me purchasing and having installed the additional replacement of the two fuel injectors that didn't fail, to be sure all four of these injectors were replaced at the time of the short block rebuild.
Now, for full disclosure, I don't drive this car much anymore. It's uncomfortable to drive, but I do start it and let it run with the heater on so that the gas engine runs and charges up the batteries. I might have been driving it once a week, or once every other week. Now, that shouldn't cause this kind of thing in my mind as cars will sit on dealer lots for weeks or months, long enough they need a jump start, and don't have this kind of problem. A full gas engine failure on a 6 year old Toyota with 35,000 miles, well that is just insane. The problem is in carfax, I verified that it did get reported that way. Not sure if others have had this, or if it was just bad luck, but it was an expensive fix just months outside of powertrain warranty expiration.
A D V E R T I S E M E N T S
So at just 35,688 miles I went to take this car to the park as I don't drive it as often as I would like, because it's short legroom causes leg/foot/nerve pain. And upon starting out, when the gas engine kicked in, it felt like a low rider car that bounces up and down. It was jerking around and just acting crazy. Never experienced anything like this before. When on electric motor, it was fine. Drove it around the block to see if it was just a rough start or something, but didn't help.
Had vehicle towed to the dealer and then got the call nobody wants to get. Apparently fuel injector 1 & 4 stuck open, and it did a cylinder wash of those, flooding the cylinders with fuel that then got into the oil. And the cylinders were scored.
Faced with a $13K-$15K repair cost to do a rebuilt/used engine with a lifetime warranty, or ditching the car, I asked if there was any other option. The service advisor said he could talk to Toyota and see if they'd assist in any way, after all it was very low mileage for such things AND there were no trouble lights/codes, and there was no previous indication of it doing this prior to failure. The engine and vehicle had been driven just a couple of days prior with zero indication of anything behing wrong.
Toyota agreed to pitch in the parts and I would pay the labor, for a total cost of $7009.04 on my end, which also included me purchasing and having installed the additional replacement of the two fuel injectors that didn't fail, to be sure all four of these injectors were replaced at the time of the short block rebuild.
Now, for full disclosure, I don't drive this car much anymore. It's uncomfortable to drive, but I do start it and let it run with the heater on so that the gas engine runs and charges up the batteries. I might have been driving it once a week, or once every other week. Now, that shouldn't cause this kind of thing in my mind as cars will sit on dealer lots for weeks or months, long enough they need a jump start, and don't have this kind of problem. A full gas engine failure on a 6 year old Toyota with 35,000 miles, well that is just insane. The problem is in carfax, I verified that it did get reported that way. Not sure if others have had this, or if it was just bad luck, but it was an expensive fix just months outside of powertrain warranty expiration.
- carcomplaintsfan, Chadds Ford, PA, US