It all started with a flat tire, and now I beg for your help!

I so wish the car could be easily fixed. In response to your (collective) questions:

oopes posted that too soon, to say the least.
I am at the Toyota Dealership so that I can determine if I am correct about the steering wheel recall. I am correct about that. However, I was just about the first repair they did, so maybe they didn't do it right? I have them checking.

I am very attentive to how a car "feels" to drive so I don't agree with the poster who claimed this to be a male vs female thing. I do notice a difference in the steering -- no response until we have turned the steering wheel much further than we used to and as the car should correct itself after a turn, it doesn't it ends up steering sharply to the right after a right turn or to the left after a left turn. This is not the way any car should behave and we would never have bought it had it been remotely like this.

I do appreciate ALL of your inputs and I am grateful, even if I don't agree that I am unable to discern how the car works. I do agree that there is a difference in how extreme my husband's opinion is vs mine. However, I might well agree with him if I had to drive the car more than once ever couple of months.

So I have asked them to drive the car and give me an opinion, change the oil without overfilling and with synthetic, rotate the tires, and redo the recall if they think something was done wrong when the recall was done the first time.

I'll update the list when/if I get anything substantive. I will be calling Luscious to schedule an appointment if I get no satisfaction here.

Also, it was an extremely flat tire and we have no idea how that happened. My husband learned that it was flat when he went to get into the car and saw a note on the window. He was headed to the hospital with what turned out to be pulmonary emboli and I was left to get the car fixed. I have a permanently smashed tibia plateau and can't bend my knee without excruciating pain. Therefore, I had it towed on a flatbed.

 

it turns out they did not check the toe. After all that. They had several people drive it around and everyone thought it was perfect. They rotated the tires, changed the oil, checked on the recall to be sure I had had it and I did. So they gave it a clean bill of health. They need to check the toe in. gasp. I knew that was probably THE issue and I asked them to check that, and they later told me that they didn't do it because it would mean that I would pay for another realignment. So, they made the decision to skip it.

 

I'll be going back to LG one more time, after calling the owner as was suggested by one of you above. I will post the results when that's been done. Perhaps that will be this Thursday or on Monday when I have tickets to see Lincecum! Go Tim.

 

Thanks so much or this. I'm resolved to go back to LG one more time about this. They did the complete alignment and it isn't satisfactory to my husband. I have to get them to recheck it again and drive it again, and as suggested above, get a Prius Gen 2 owner to drive it.

 

He works ALL the time. There's no way to get him to SF for this.

 

indeed. also, I insisted on Synthetic oil, on getting the car in regularly, on keeping it going as perfectly as I can. He let the previous Accord run completely down to sludge. So I thought I could do better than that. Now, I'm not so sure. Making him happy about this car may be impossible now. He's dug in about this.

 

no offense taken, other than that which I deserve.

 

Appointment at LG made. There seems to be only one mechanic, or one that they are willing for me to have, and I like him. I did t

I've thought about the possibility that his reactions to all of these issues are influenced by his recent and longer term (different) medical issues. However, his PE's are not large, he was never on any equipment, nor was he actually hospitalized. He was treated in an urgent care center and released to home with a medication that does not need hospitalization, close followup or blood level tests. He seemed to recover immediately, though freaked out at work the next week -- feeling chest pain and going in an ambulance to be checked. I completely understood that reaction to such a frightening issue. To make matters worse, he is on a CPAP which he feels has caused breathing pain, that he insists, is different than the breathing pain he had when he had his embolisms. So in addition to trying to fix the car, we are trying to determine what that issue really is. I am mindful that he is prone to create the wrong connections between causes and effects.

I agree that different tires will feel different. I want to get LG to give him a clear answer and I think he'll probably be able to live with whatever they say. We will check toe and other issues and have him talk on the phone to them.