Timing cover oil leak

The engine on my 1998 Mazda MPV began leaking about 10 years, ago. It leaks half a quart in 5k miles.

After trying again an again to fix the leak, I jut let it go. There's an spot on tthe driveway. 100k miles later and the car still starts, goes where I want it to, and costs me almost nothing to operate.

Drive on................ "Ole paint!"

 

Unfortunately the photo of your service invoice is not sufficiently high-resolution to read. The sensor in the last photo is probably the crankshaft position sensor.

 

I hope my car is that clean.

 

i think toyota got hosed on that one. congrats xl!

 

What? That is a darn clean engine, no problems there.

 

I hope the OP will report back in a month whether the tiny oil residue is actually gone, or if it has returned.

 

Seriously ?

If a future Toyota starts giving customers a hard time with borderline requests for warranty assistance, remember back to this example of abuse.

 

yes, but it was the dealer, not the customer.

 

OP lives in Hawaii, where the distributor is Servco Pacific, not TMS USA. The Toyota dealerships in Hawaii all are owned by Servco Pacific, so they are vertically integrated.

The question is whether the distributor is self-funding with respect to warranty claims; or if the distributor files warranty claims with Toyota in Japan. My guess would be that the distributor is expected to absorb the cost of warranty issues without going back to Toyota for reimbursement...

 

interesting, they shot themselves in the foot?

 

Or the dealership could point to this as an example of the "Aloha spirit" which motivates them to take care of their customers' vehicles under warranty, before a minor problem gets worse.

 

except they told him about it, expecting him to pay up. and when he pointed out the toyota warranty, they had already boxed themselves into a corner.

 

Good analysis, I believe you are correct. So forget the Aloha spirit nonsense...

 

of course, we don't know if they really did anything.

 

Then why would Toyota have any say in authorizing the repairs ?

 

For those of us who live in the 49 US states besides Hawaii, "Toyota" is Toyota Motor Sales, USA, which is the mainland US Toyota distributor. We never hear that a US dealer has to get approval from Toyota in Japan for a warranty repair.

It is appropriate that the party which bears the financial cost of the warranty should be the one to interpret and enforce the warranty provisions.

Well, at minimum the tech probably used brake parts cleaner to spray down the affected areas...that is why I asked the OP to post back after some time has elapsed, to see whether the oil stain has come back or not.

 

If I am following your reasoning, you are saying that a mainland repair would be authorized by the distributor, so perhaps the same holds true for Hawaii.

Perhaps, except that the mainland distributor is owned by Toyota, the car manufacturer. Right ?