Condenser dies after 2 years

We live in Pittsburgh and don't use our AC too much so we were surprised on Memorial Day weekend 2008 that the AC was not working on our 2006 vehicle. Of course we've overshot the warranty by 4,000 miles already so we knew we were going to have to pay for the repair somehow.

The dealership said it would cost $985 to repair and that they would not know if there had been rock damage until they opened it up. The insurance company said that they would have to be there when the dealership pulled the condenser out to be sure they were simply not showing them a damaged condenser from elsewhere.

Instead of having it fixed at the dealership, we asked the the insurance adjustor to come to our house. He claimed to be a former manager of the repair shop at a Toyota dealership, unfortunately he said that he saw no sign that a rock had damaged the condenser. Clearly there was a very dark area on the grille where supposedly the coolant had leaked out. He qualified it as a "maintenance problem" ... whatever THAT means. If it just sprung a leak after two years of being barely used, I'd call that a manufacturing problem!

Regardless, of the cause, a local garage mechanic fixed it for less than HALF of what the dealership quoted us AND they used a genuine Toyota part! The labor was an hour and a half. The insurance adjustor had come up with a similar total, about $500, for a repair with an "after market" part, (meaning non-Toyota) and an estimate of 3.7 hours of labor. The mechanic did NOT think that the problem was caused by a collision with a rock so there was no hope of having insurance cover part of the cost.


Too bad we did not think to have the AC (and probably everything else) checked before we exceeded 36k miles, but hey that's part of the reason we wanted a Toyota, because they are reliable, right? Hopefully we will remember this lesson as we approach ten years / 100,000 miles!

Anne