Prius Brake Recall – A Little More Information

If that's their policy it is indeed a very foolish one. It means they could be, and probably are, sending people back out on the road with what could be serious safety defects just because some mechanic couldn't duplicate the problem while driving around the block. I have seen the same thing at two different Toyota dealers, fortunately not over safety related items.

This might be a real good place for Toyota to start making customer service improvements?

I understand that in some states the Attorney General's Office will help you if you are having problems with a car dealer.

 

Amen to that!

 

While I'm not saying that Toyota is doing things right, what exactly is a tech supposed to do when they can't replicate a problem? I were Toyota I wouldn't be admitting to problems that I haven't verified exist.

I assume you have filed a report with NHTSA.

 

As a somewhat interested bystander, it would seem that Toyota could take a more direct involvement in trying to get to a resolution of Lucky's issue. For example, they could authorize a loaner car while the dealer attempts to recreate the problem with the cruise control. They are doing the loaner car thing for customers whose cars are the subject of recalls, so, there is a precedent for the free loaner car concept.

Separately, the dealer that Lucky is taking their car to sounds like it isn't scoring terribly well on customer satisfaction surveys. Toyota corporate should have access to the dealer customer satisfaction surveys for all of the dealers in Lucky's area. It should be a trivial effort to arrange for the dealer with the highest customer satisfaction score in the area to handle the work on Lucky's car. There is nothing that says the car has to be serviced by the selling dealer. If a free loaner is provided to Lucky, it gets kind of hard for Lucky to defend having to deal with the nearest dealer.

It ultimately comes down to how hard does Toyota want to try to make things right for a customer. Time to put actions behind the words.

 

As Toyota knows too well, intermittent failures are the hardest to try and diagnose. That doesn't mean they don't occur. The question is how badly does Toyota want to have a satisfied customer?

Ironically, these hard to replicate issues were one of the drivers behind on-board data logging (in addition to be able to prove where an owner had abused the car which in turn caused the failure that they were trying to get repaired under warranty). As an illustration, BMW has a real problem with continuing failures of the high pressure fuel pump on their twin turbo 6 cylinder engine. The pump can intermittently go in and out of failure mode; depending on the alignment of the Sun, Earth and Moon, the pump may or may not decide to fail when the customer brings the car to the dealer. Fortunately, the electronics on the car logs the failure and all the dealer has to do is hook up a code reader; if they read the code for the failed pump, they get authorization from BMW to replace the pump. No questions asked. The pump replacement is something like a $1,000 repair.

 

I don't think it should be the technicians problem at all. He should be given sufficient time and resources to try and find the problem, a little better training wouldn't hurt either. The dealers and/or Toyota should be realistic enough to admit there really are intermittent problems. Sometimes they need to believe their customers are telling them the truth.

If the intermittent problem could lead to a serious safety issue maybe they should provide a loner car and spend a little time looking, instead of saying it's not their policy to accept the the customers word. Sometimes people need to throw their policies out and try to do their job instead of looking for reasons why they can't.

 

But policies are very handy when you don't want to be bothered with an intermittent failure. They are not something that can be challenged. They are inanimate objects that people are forced to accept. They are convenient to cite when you don't want to be bothered by a pesky customer - "I am sorry, but it is our policy, ma'am...."

A middle-fingered wave would be more honest, but not politically correct. It would also go viral on YouTube, while a policy gets lost in the noise.

 

:violin: wish I could send u some cheese for your whine

 

What they should do to start is:

Document
Report
Respond to customers

That shouldn't have been this difficult.

I don't know what NHTSA is or how to report to them; but I waited on hold for a little less than an hour to report to Toyota's offical phone number because I did not get anything but an auto-responder to my emailed report.

It seems to me that a lack of clear procedure for reporting is part of the problem.

 

Nice!

Proud of yourself RU?

 

I spoke with my dealership's Customer Relations Manager today. She is so overwhelmed she hasn't been able to listen to, or reply to the message I left her yesterday.
She said they are working on getting the help they need to respond to their customers in a timely fashion.
The service manager is going to try to see if it fails for him but will document the issue and the fact that he could not duplicate the failure.
All I have ever asked for was to have the issue documented, to try to find out if others are experiencing the same thing, and to receive an acknowledgment from Toyota they are aware of the failure and are committed to resolving it.
I have moved to the recommended repair site, but I think this example speaks to a general failure in SOME Toyota Dealerships to report customer concerns with corporate. I also feel Toyota Corporate needs to repair their dis-connect to their customers.

 

look, the general repair shop pay rate system is based on fixing problems. not on finding them. if a tech spends 4 hours driving your car around and does not find a problem, he does not get paid for those 4 hours. if he spends 4 hours driving your car around and does find a problem, then spends 1 hour fixing it on 1 hour of billable time, he just got paid 1 hour for 5 hours worth of work. try putting food on your table when you get paid like that. even 80 hour weeks are horribly insufficient at that rate.

this is not conducive to supporting diagnostic work. and dealers do not work to support their talented diagnostic techs, which is why DH is not in the auto repair business anymore. this is an industry-wide problem, not something specific to toyota.

 

All I ever expected is for Toyota to document & acknolwedege my reported problem in case their were others experiencing the same issue.
They were the ones who told me that they couldn't report it unless they could duplicate it.

 

It does however go to why toyota has problems diagnosing problems, it doesn't try most of the time.

Mr. Toyoda said that they would try to train people for continuous improvement. This used to be part of the Toyota way. If you do not record customer complaints, you have gone directly against the old corporate culture. The industry standard did not used to be part of the Toyota standard. btw: I was called after both my service appointments (once to turn off the reverse beep, once for the brake software) so if I had a non-repeatable problem it would at least be noted at the dealership and part of gulf states toyota.

 

The way Toyota does business and the way dealers are paying their technicians shouldn't be the customers problem. I sympathize with the employees but when my car needs attention I want it fixed. I don't want to be given excuses, such as "If we don't see the problem we can't report it." I can't fix their failing business model and I shouldn't be forced to worry about it just because I was nice enough to buy one of their cars. Car dealers really shouldn't try to make their problems my problems. I give them lots of money and they give me a car with a warranty, I don't want to be hassled when it needs to be repaired.

This is not uniquely a Toyota problem, unfortunately it seems to be endemic to the automobile retail business. You will see exactly the same kinds of issues reported in other car forums. The National Automobile Dealers Association is a very rich powerful organization and they usually get whatever they want. Automobile manufacturers and their dealers should make sure the technicians are paid for diagnostics, it's the only way it's going to be done correctly.

 

Let me share something I learned about how some dealers are dealing with the 'research' problem. Some dealers have put their shop foreman on a salary. All of the hard problems go to the shop foreman to research and figure out how to solve. The rest of the flat rate problems get sent to the regular technicians for replacement of the defective part(s). I saw this personally with my lemon law car. The first dealer that I took the car to for water leaks made one attempt to repair the car and when it continued to have water leaks said they could not reproduce the leaking. I then changed dealers, and the second dealer went through all manner of efforts to solve the water leaks. Ultimately, the repairs were not successful and the car was repurchased pursuant to the California Lemon Law. After the repurchase, I stopped by the second dealer's service department and asked what was different about their business model versus the first dealer. That was when I found out the the first dealer was on a flat rate system for every repair technician versus the second dealer had shop foreman who were on salary....

Just some more data points as to how things could get to a solution set if there was the will....