Dealership refusing to cover under warranty due to offroad abuse

So all this happened in December and you’re bringing it up now why?

 

Try a different dealer

 

I dunno, warranties are to cover things that are manufactured defects.

Smashing your brake drums and slashing up your CV boots offroad wouldn't fall into that category, now would they?

Unless OP is insinuating that his offroading couldn't possibly have caused any damage... that those parts just spontaneously failed because they were defective from the factory...

 

Have to side with the dealer on this one...you gave them the evidence to deny the claim!

 

If offroad wears out the brakes and drums I see offroad caused failure. If you rip out a brake line I see offroad caused failure. But if you blow out a wheel cylinder to me thats a warrenty issue. If you loose your cv boots and your not lifted to me thats a warenty issue. I would be filing a claim with Toyota directly with a bill from your mechanic. All the pictures and a letter of the cause of failure from your mechanic signed by the mechanic. Make them respond in writing to your claim. Then you can push an appeal to higher management. After that, then you can decide if its worth persuing it in small claims court where they will have to spend time and money with your claim and so will you. You can also take this and file a complaint to the better buisness and your state attorney generals office. The ball is now in your repairmans diognosis of failure. Was the cause of failure offroad induced or not. Was it caused by abuse beyond normal operation. At this point you don't even have a denial with Toyota you only have an issue with an independent company that sells and services Toyotas.

 

I heard it was off road READY.

 

To be fair, the LC does have considerably more weight in the rear. Not a lot of traction for rear bias braking if you only have a truck bed back there.

 

Oh stop. There is no justification for the drum rears.

 

Yep. The Tacoma and the Yaris.

 

LAWYER UP

 

You are not telling the entire story.

 

Dealers will do anything to not honor warranty...I’m always on the defense now for anything I go into...thier worry is corporate won’t reimburse them for it. I’d say go to a different dealer but kind of hard and frankly unsafe without brakes...reach out to corporate and tell them how can you sell a vehicle made for off-roading but can’t off-road..false advertisement if you ask me. So people with the TRD PRO can’t off-road with all the expensive upgrades they’ve paid for too? That makes no sense because the TRD PRO at the yearly auto show always has one or two wheel spring onto a boulder...like flexing real hard...is it not meant to do that either? Then why are we paying for these suspensions...and it’s mud for Godsakes, an off-road vehicle isn’t allowed to tread mud?

Did you get stuck wheels deep and spin endlessly or something that your boots got tore up?

 

Really? Of course the truck will go off road. When you are done you gotta clean what you got dirty and you have to fix what you broke. That's the owner's responsibility.
Yes you can go in mud! But, you got to remove mud from where it does not belong.
Let me guess... you don't go offroad much.

 

Man, that stinks that Toyota wouldn’t honor their warranty or even work with you on price. The difference in price between private repair and genuine Yota was less than $200 with towing? Not sure I would have done it that way, but your decision. I have 2wd & don’t like even getting my truck dirty, LOL!! .

 

By Toyota’s logic, I should never take a 4Runner, Land Cruise, Sequoia, Tundra, etc off road.

Sure...the rear drums function fine. But we all know it was cost savings/lack of adaptation costs that's the reasons for it.

+1 for the bean counters.

 

^^^^^This

 

I'm with the OP on this one. Weird shit happens sometimes, and if the dealer suspects abuse they'd better be ready to back those assertions up.

For example I broke a hose clamp for a shock reservoir mount on Vail Pass recently, on I-70 proper. Paved road.

Road conditions were TERRIBLE, I think I kicked more ice off of my truck than I ever had before when I got home. The best I could figure is that I had a bunch of sand that had blown into the clamp earlier, and the weight of the giant clog of ice I had up under the wheel wells was just too much for the clamp.

Now granted I fixed it myself, but it's totally possible that a component can fail under normal driving conditions.

 

I was driving in a parking lot and sideswiped another vehicle and now Toyota won't even warranty the damage to my paint! Are they saying these trucks are not meant to drive in parking lots!?

 

There's something wrong with this story...

The rear brake is an enclosed mechanism. By the sound of this story as told, it had a catastrophic failure and took out virtually all of the parts.

And there was mud in there.

I've dealt with mud damage a time or two. It's abrasive. It wears surfaces. It causes seal failures. It eats brake pads. It takes off protective coatings and lets everything rust.

But it doesn't destroy things like a bomb went off in there. It grinds metal away, and it takes a while.

The story makes it sound like everything was just fine and dandy. Then, suddenly and without warning, no brakes. Being the cautious type, and knowing it was damaged, You decided to drive it to the dealer.

I'm going to go out on a limb, and suggest the story goes more like this-

You went out to play in the mud, and stuck that rear wheel in some soupy mud. It probably sat there like that a while and the mud/soupy water mix got in there.

Then, you drove the truck home and parked it. After it sat a while, the water dried up some and the brake was partially filled with dirt.

Then, You drove the truck as if nothing happened. As You were doing this, the highly abrasive dirt ate away at the lining on the brake shoes, and the inside of the drum.

It probably didn't brake straight. Because the dirt interfered with normal brake function, the truck probably pulled toward the opposite side every time you stopped. This was ignored.

At some point, The lining on the brake shoes wore completely away and this caused the steel backing of the brake shoe to contact the drum. Quite naturally, This made a nasty grinding sound. This was ignored.

Continued driving like this caused extended grinding of the drum and shoes. Because of the material worn away, the brake shoes pushed farther out every time you stepped on the brake. The noise from the Metal-To-Metal contact got louder and louder. At some point, Galling began to happen and the extreme heat generated caused melting and welding of the metals. This created a rough, lumpy surface that didn't slide smoothly any more. Now every stop was a jerky, grabby, noisy experience that all the other cars around you could hear. This was ignored.

This insanity continued until finally, the limits of the design were reached. The wear was so severe and amount of metal removed was so great that the pistons in the slave cylinder came out of the bore.

This allowed the brake fluid to run out. There was a point where the brake pedal went soft. Because the travel on the brake master cylinder is small, and the resivior holds many times more fluid than a single stroke of the brake pedal can pump out... You had to step on the brake pedal many times before it stopped working entirely. So, that's what you did. Completely ignoring an amazing amount of warning.

At that point, there were probably pieces broken off and dropped into the rotating brake drum..

So, then you drove it to the dealer. Grinding and crunching all the way.

Now, what part of that story are we supposed to believe is a defect in materials and workmanship?

You made an incredible number of bad decisions, and this damage is entirely abuse. No warranty repairs for you, sir.

 

Now THAT is funny...


lol