Suspicious of recall work...

Has anyone else experienced a strange synchronicity?

On Tuesday, June 29th, I finally got around to getting the accelerator pedal recall work done, even though I had experienced no problems with the accelerator. I wanted to comply with Toyota and government regulations and maintain a safe vehicle, since the defect was potentially life-threatening. This was my first and will certainly be my last time to drop my car off at the Hoover Toyota service department.

Upon dropping off the car at 11:15 a.m., I was told by an attendant that my car would be quickly serviced. The recall letter I had received in the mail said the service could take around an hour or more. Thus, I opted to sit in the waiting room at the dealership. I waited, and I waited. Finally I called a friend to take me to get lunch around 2:30. I had him drop me back off at the dealership at 3:45. I waited for another 45 minutes until finally, my name was called, and my car was ready more than 5 hours later. I thought it was a wasted day in the waiting room, but it turned out to be far more costly than that.

I drove the Prius home and it seemed all was well. On Wednesday morning, I drove my car to work, and immediately noticed a shaking when I would accelerate, as if the engine was misfiring. I thought that perhaps there were some kinks that needed to be worked out with the accelerator. So I drove on, and the problem seemed to smooth itself out the longer I drove. However, upon driving home from work, I felt something similar.

On Thursday, I was running an errand for work and felt a sudden and far more violent hesitation and shaking of my car, to the point that the skidding caution light started flashing on my dashboard panel. This concerned me, but I had little time to investigate the problem with Hoover Toyota. The car smoothed out the longer I drove it that day.

But the problem continued on Friday. As the shaking sporadically continued, I noticed the “Check Engine†light flash on and off. Later that day, after another bout of accelerator hesitation, it stayed on. After that, I stopped driving the car (except to take it back to the Toyota dealership on Tuesday, July 6th exactly one week after it had been serviced). It only made sense to me that because the accelerator pedal had been replaced, this was the related cause of the shaky acceleration.

I called the dealership Monday afternoon, July 5th, and spoke with the foreman of the service garage, who said the garage was booked up for the rest of that day, but that they could look at it first thing in the morning. So that’s what I did. At lunch on Tuesday, I was called by Ronnie Harralson, who was the bearer of bad news. He told me that after the diagnostic test, it turned out my car was misfiring because of water in the cylinders, which had leaked down from the cowl, and damaged 3 ignition coils and all my spark plugs. He then quickly rattled off a quote to fix the damage at $599.98. At this point, I could not believe my ears. Essentially, I told Ronnie as respectfully as I could that I believed there was a connection between his shop’s recall work on my car, and the apparent misfiring of my engine within 24 hours of getting my car back from Toyota. He insisted it was merely a coincidence and that the hood was never lifted for the recall work. I then asked him why it took over 5 hours to do what should have been a routine accelerator pedal replacement, and I further asked him what had really been going on behind the closed garage door. At that point in time, this eerie coincidence seemed all too suspicious to accept as mere bad luck.

I had further questions as to how water could ever get into my cylinders, and how this could have suddenly surfaced as a problem the day after Toyota had possession of my car, even though no rain or water had touched my car in more than 2 weeks. I then asked him if, considering the economy and the recent public relations of Toyota, that his garage might be desperate enough to fabricate their own business. He insisted this was not the case. I am still not persuaded…

 

Patrick, thanks for the great advice. I'll check out my spark plugs tomorrow. If there is no sign of long-term corrosion, I'm marching back to the Toyota service center.

I'll also look into sealing my cowl.

 

Unfortunately they gave me no courtesy car wash. The thing hasn't been washed in several months, actually, which is why I'm all the more suspicious of water getting down into my motor.