I have had a different experience with Toyota. We bought my wife a new Toyota Solara in 2007 with the renowned 4 cyl. engine. She liked it fine until just before 100,000 miles it started going through a lot of oil. It being a newer car and me being an old timer I looked it over and didn't recognize anything under the hood. A friend suggested that I look on your tube to see if there was anything there.Boy was there. It seems that in that time span Toyota got a batch of bad pistons and rings that started giving problems around 100,000 miles.They did a semi silent recall that we didn't hear about because we moved about the time this all came up and of course our mail got all screwed up. My wife did say that we had received one letter saying there was a possible problem and we would be notified later if our car was involved then we moved and the forwarding address expired apparently before we got a second letter, if they sent one. When I told my wife about it we made an appointment with the closest dealer with a reasonable reputation, the closest one to us has a terrible rep.. Any way we took the car in and the service writer listened to our story and told us the procedure they had to go through to verify we had one of the bad ones. He then scanned the vin # on the dash and said "I'm sorry but your 10 days too late for the program. We will do the piston replacement for $4000 and that does not include any other problems we may encounter". I blew my stack and told my wife lets go before I get in trouble but she insisted on talking to the manager. He backed up his service manager and told us that he would be glad to give us a good deal on a new one. I let him know the chances of us ever owning another Toyota and we left. This is the 2nd Toyota that I've lost the engine in but the first was a Tacoma 4 cyl. that got a wrist pin rattle at 145,000 mi. They wanted $3500 to replace the pistons. I sold it, in pieces to one of their mechanics and even delivered it for him as I was there with a trailer already.
I worked construction most of my life and knew a lot of guys that drove them and swore by them but I guess I'm just a bad apple kind of guy with them.
By the way when we first bought the car I said that we needed to have the dealer service it so they could keep up with any computer updates. The closest dealer did the first service and when it came due for the second my wife, who is normally right on top of this kind of thing, realized that it was due on a Sat. afternoon when she was getting ready to take our grandkids,visiting from Co.,to Universal Studios. I went out to do the oil change myself and had to use a cheater wrench to get the drain plug out because it was so tight and the plastic gasket was ruined. That ended having them touch the car.
