Toyota Dealer Battery Sabotage

Hard to prove sabotage or just bad coincidental luck. Dealers that try to squeeze all your money out are definitely a plague. The "underfilled oil" plus replacing 3-coils is ridiculous which puts me on the side of them being a sleezy dealership. A respectable mechanic just doesn't play those games.

But the battery being sabotaged... It is not easy to do. Unless they parked your car in the paint bake room for a few days to heat accelerate the death or made a hybrid problem by disconnecting some wires, it just doesn't happen. I agree with @ericbecky that you should get an OBDII reader if you don't already have one. Read the codes and record them. Clear them and see what comes back.

 

Eh, could've been policy involved. Don't re-enable a degraded system etc. I've seen that before- a customer car came in with utterly destroyed brakes, but the customer didn't want them rebuilt and was unwilling to have the car towed away, while the shop manager refused to allow the customer to drive it away. Cases like that seem to involve a big delta between the car's condition and the customer's perception of the car's condition.

 

Taking the car half apart and not putting it properly back together would be sabotage.

 

Right, the exact point I'm hitting is when "putting it properly back together" means one thing to the shop (due to law, company policy, insurance requirement) and something else to the customer (due to needing to pick up the kids in 24 minutes)

We don't have to assume that whatever was done was an error.

 

I would NEVER do business with Auto Nation. Went there once to look at a used van. They couldn't stop telling me how it just passed there incredible used car inspections blah, blah, blah. First thing I did was to pull out the dipstick to find not a drop of oil in the engine. So much for there fantastic inspection. I couldn't leave there fast enough

 

The lack of oil on a dipstick does NOT necessarily mean a total lack of oil in the engine.

 

That’s pretty much proof of the pudding. Thanks for that post.

Very true, but, I still would not buy a car there!