Toyota launches groundbreaking 10-year warranty (in UK)
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I didn’t see it in the article, but I wonder if that includes getting all of the dealerships “suggested maintenance” if you want the warranty extension to apply. I’ve had lots of sketchy dealership overcharging experiences, and if you need 5 dealership service visits to get up to the full 10 years, I can see this “warranty” costing thousands of dollars in unnecessary/fake maintenance. I’m sure that there are good actors out there, at dealerships too, but it is easy to be abused.
This seems like a tactic to bring in more money, not one that Toyota is just doing for the sake of standing behind their products. Most cars can last beyond 10yr / 100k miles, so I don’t think this costs them much. But to get the dealerships to charge you $300 for a cabin air filter a few times will probably make them more than they lose.
as long as they are under 10 years old and have covered fewer than 100,000 miles
In North America it's very common for cars to have this many miles long before the 10 year mark.
Somewhere between ~8k and ~9k, according to a random BBC article I found:
FHA says the average is 14,300 miles a year, but 12,524 miles per year in our most populous state (California)
I guess that means the average American will hit 100,000 miles in 7 years.
https://www.thezebra.com/resources/driving/average-miles-dri...
my current 4runner warranty/service plan covers all scheduled maintenance, filters, lubricants, etc. for the first 100k miles. However, I do have to bring it in yearly, even if the next oil change isn't due based on milage alone.
its certainly a money play, but also keeping their vehicles in good working order helps with a lot of metrics like resell value, longevity, etc that car buyers look at. i think toyota is the largest buyer of used toyotas.
If you're going to the dealer for anything other than warranty or free repairs, then you have too much money and need to be relieved of it.
- My late grandfather who was a master mechanic retired from a dealership who once sold horses and buggies in the SF Bay Area.
No matter how many times we look elsewhere, we always end up back in Toyotas. Hoping their EV R&D shows promise soon.
We got a 2017 highlander and apart from the god awful infotainment system it has been amazing. Sort of like computers these days, I find myself wondering when I’d need or even want to upgrade.
It hasn’t really needed service yet after 80,000km. Everything is running well. My mechanic says I must be taking excellent care of it, but I’m not doing anything I haven’t before. This thing just seems to be better designed than any VW or Ford I’ve had.
Our previous Toyota was OLD but similarly rock solid. I’ve come to like their cars a lot. A friend has a 4 runner as well that has been going strong for around 15 years.
I think what’s remarkable isn’t necessarily having something incredible to say about their cars. It’s more so that I just have nothing to complain about.
I shopped Toyota for a trucks several times and was appalled by the MPG ratings. When a Tacoma is getting far worse MPG than a F-150 it's time for an update.
Why isn't the Dodge and lineup regarded as reliable?
Ford E-series is how old?
Most of Nissan's sedans are pretty long in the tooth now that I think about it.
A large part of why Toyota stuff is so reliable is that they're expensive up front both new and "newish" used. They also won't finance just anyone with a pulse like the "unreliable" brands will. So the people who get their hands on them can afford to maintain them on schedule and can afford to treat them well. You'll never see a newish Sienna owner stacking one floor to ceiling with bags of concrete to avoid paying for the Home Depot truck rental. You'll never see a newish 4Runner bouncing down the road with an out of round tire. You'll never see a newish Camry dragging ass hauling a family of 5 and all their luggage (the person with that use case in the Toyota tax bracket can justify/afford a Highlander) Can't say that about a Pacifica, Patriot or Altima.
Refinement certainly helps but Toyotas are reliable because any car would be reliable in the hands of Toyota owners. Any car would routinely make it to high mileage if they got babied for their first 100k (or so)
This has not been my experience. Toyotas are just better built coming out of the factory. In the past I've had newish Chevy, Ford, and Nissan cars, and after about 30-50k miles each of them started having various small noises/rattles that built over time until something failed. The Toyota is just smoother overall out of the factory, and parts wear out more slowly.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnWKz7Cthkk [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTPnIpjodA8 [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFnVZXQD5_k
Toyota Recalls 1993 Camry Due To Fact That Owners Really Should Have Bought Something New By Now
https://www.theonion.com/toyota-recalls-1993-camry-due-to-fa...
0. Scotty Kilmer - internet famous mechanic in Houston TX - https://www.youtube.com/user/scottykilmer
Well, they did come up with the Prius, so I think they might have a shot at EVs.
If you don't hit all the tropes and get people to share your content and get all the resulting clicks the algo will bury you.
Toyota has good vehicles as far as I can tell, but their ignoring of me has put me off of them.
For my next vehicle, I chose a different brand, and the vehicle had some issues, but that manufacturer made things right with no hassle.
I don't know which is better: a vehicle that will most likely be good with a company that doesn't care, or a vehicle that has some issues but with a company that does care and fixes it.
This is like saying you refuse to play any game in the Call of Duty franchise because GameStop charges $70 instead of $60 for it.
https://blogs.findlaw.com/law_and_life/2016/02/5-times-you-c...
https://mechanics.stackexchange.com/questions/21528/what-rep...
If you have a specific problem that they refuse to fix, then there's Lemon law.
Having said that, I recently took my Acura (Honda) to a local service station because the timing belt was quoted at near $2k and I got it done for ~$900 at a local service station. New water pump and another belt were included (as they would have been at the dealer).
What really frustrated me was the messages I was getting from the dealer. When should the timing belt be replaced? First it was 90k miles, then it was 60k miles, and because I was below both it was after 7 years (it's been 10). The other thing, for my model, some sources said "if it breaks, your engine will be damaged" but the dealer wouldn't tell me either way. I even contact Acura USA and they wouldn't contradict the dealer. Whole thing left me wanting a Toyota/Lexis.
So long as this doesn’t make service even more expensive, at least I’d get something for it that I don’t today. At the moment I tend to instead trade for a newer car once the 2-5 year warranty runs out. This would be cheaper than that at least.
I owned a Chevy Equinox and took it to a dealership for work around 80,000km (my numbers might be off, this was 5 or so years ago). They told me the transmission fluid had met it's suggested replacement. I wanted to keep warranty valid so I approved the work. Somehow I then found out that the manufacturers recommended interval was like 200,000km. I was only required to follow the manufacturers schedule not the made up dealers recommended schedule. If you ask, they give you some BS about the "local climate and amount of construction dust so we recommend different intervals etc etc". Either way, you aren't required to follow those schedules.
I never returned to that dealership or any other with the car because it was clear that although they sell the cars they know almost nothing about them.
But yeah, your story is unfortunately a usual ordeal at dealerships.
She said the car was always serviced at that dealer and the service writer said there is no way to prove that.
The dealer is making a calculated (at scale, not in any particular case) business decision that these people have enough money that they'll just bend over and take it rather than create a hassle for themselves by fighting.
If the dealer hadn't made business decision the service writer would be apologetic and offered a steep discount or whatever. But they did so the service writer is playing hardball.
Not the business decision I'd make but I completely understand the incentive.
When I got it back the check engine light was on and the car was idling rough where previously it was just notifying of scheduled service and running fine. The dealer took another look and determined that I had a bent intake valve. They quoted me $15,000.00 to fix it.
They claimed this must be my fault, probably downshifting on the highway. I noted that the car ran fine when I dropped it off and a missed shift would bend more than one valve. Also, they were just doing service in the intake near the valves (with a media blaster) and that the car had 30 more miles than when I dropped it off. It seemed obvious to me that any engine damage was done by them. They insisted it was "impossible" that the damage was done by them.
I said not to do anything and that I would tow it to another shop for another opinion. Strangely they suggested I could drive the car to another shop (with a bent valve?). I had it towed and the other shop determined that one of the new spark plugs had the electrode pinched shut so it was shorting out. They also noted that the coils did not look new. They installed a new plug (~$12.00) and the car ran fine. To be sure they also did a compression test and found no evidence of a bent valve.
I went back to the BMW shop and got all my money back for the service. The service writer still had the balls to tell me that I "should be prepared for expensive service bills on these cars". I wonder how much of that reputation comes from shady dealerships ripping people off. I suspect quite a bit.
I have no proof but I think the dealership sabotaged the car on purpose. There's no way any inspection would have missed the shorted plug. The car was immediately warning of the condition after startup and was misfiring badly.
Dealerships absolutely will rip you off if they think they can get away with it.
Tech probably just screwed it up because flat rate techs are always racing the clock.
If you were just dealing with the service writer the tech probably never even knew you had issues with it until the situation was too far gone to salvage.
Even if the plug was improperly gapped from the factory (or dropped on the floor) the tech would have to miss that and the fact that the car ran worse when he finished than when it arrived. And that the computer said things are worse.
It's either malicious or so incompetent that there's no practical difference.
I talked to the tech on the phone before finding out about the plug. The tech definitely knew I was having trouble. Interestingly the tech did admit it would be possible to bend a vale doing the media blasting. I guess that's why service writers exist to "manage the customer".
I mean by that logic no work can ever be warrantied, who knows if someone went and opened up your oil drain plug if 10 miles out of the shop your car dies and it looks like someone forgot to fill it back up with oil?
Literally the only benefit I can think of for dealer visits outside of exotics is that they're usually high volume enough that in cases like this they can come up to bat for a regular. That's it.
It doesn't really matter if someone else worked on it or not. It would be highly unlikely the engine would still be running without oil, and the dealer would immediately tell her she came with no oil in the engine, not that her oil pan is stripped.
Ultimately when she pressed them on it, they agreed that the warranty would only be voided as to issues that would have been caught during such service call, but which were not caught and then got worse.
A Honda service can easily be double that due to replacing the timing belt.
An independent mechanic found and fixed the issue with no hassle.
Never again will I waste my time with dealerships, or any mechanic with a diagnostic fee. Far too easy for them to say “sorry couldn’t reproduce the problem, that’ll be $150”
This is every business decision!
It's great that Toyota has measured the improvement in customer trust or loyalty being more valuable to them in the long run than shirking on quality.
I only wish more companies would do this!
That's a funny way of framing "feeling the heat from the Koreans and Mitsubishi and offering their own comparable warranty"
At the end of the day, you don't actually need to abide by the warranty and you can still have your standard warranty period if you don't follow the rules.
It came with a service card where the price of each service check was listed. And while the price didn’t exactly double each year, they grew exponentially and would have ended up more than doubling the price of the bicycle.
I ended up forgoing the warranty and decide that a new bike was a better option.
An anecdote of why I'm asking -- I have Samsung dishwasher, for example, and it broke less than two years for very, very minimal use (I use it like once every two weeks). Based on that experience and having owned a Samsung galaxy phone that slowed down significantly after about 2-3 years (again, I installed almost no apps other than essential ones like Gmail and a couple of bank apps), I am not sure if Korean manufacturing has matured enough for me to consider buying a car made by one of the Korean manufacturers. This is, of course, not to diss on Korean manufacturers. Just wanted to explain why I am asking this question to begin with.
Forgive me for getting up on my soapbox, but ... I strongly recommend avoiding Samsung appliances like the plague. I have had nothing but bad luck with Samsung appliances that were not TVs or computer-related. My washer and dryer both failed the first time after less than a year of use. My fridge lasted about two years before the control panel started losing LEDs, and now I replace that control panel periodically -- the replacements start burning out LEDs again typically within a matter of months. LEDs! Burning out! WTF.
To their credit, the mechanical bits of the fridge have been flawless so far (9 years later) but the control panel issue makes me hot under the collar. It's always a guess now as to whether the dispenser is about to give you cubed ice, crushed ice, or water. And judging by the volume of complaints online, I'm not the only one who has this exact experience with their refrigerators.
I even bought my washer and dryer specifically on the recommendation of Consumer Reports. The first time I can remember where they led me astray.
I've owned GM, Honda, Ford, VW, and Chrysler. I've been very disappointed in all of them.
I bought a 2019 santa fe with the same engine. As these engines are now covered under lifetime warranty. I had 0 problems with the car in the last 2 years, and honestly I am quite amazed with how much of car I got for 34k with 0% financing. I have the highest trim with AWD, which had original MSRP of $39k, so I did get a decent deal.
IMO, hyundai/kia is a great buy, Toyota/Honda used to be a good deal some years ago but right now their cars are overpriced, toyota especially.
Toyota does still retain value quite well. However, carmax offered me $32k for my car, so almost what I paid. This most likely due to the chip shortage so that value would probably be lower normally.
That being said the V6 lambda engines are very nice and considered reliable. They started with the Genesis which was an important flagship vehicle. I have a V6 and have had no issues approaching 100k. But I am the type of person that wants to get 200k out of my vehicles, I have no idea if that will happen. I'd be upset if the car failed before 10 years as well.
There are forums where you can get an idea, especially if you look at previous model years.
I would prefer to never buy another car (and would absolutely not buy a Samsung car) but Hyundai's absolutely on my 'consider again' list.
They’re basically giving you a year warranty every time you service your car with them at an official dealership, this basically keeps going until the car does 10 years or 100,000 miles. So 10 years with 10 services.
The Kia/Hyundai one is just a bog standard 10 (maybe 7 now) years, without needing to do an annual service. You can also pass it on when you sell it. Seems to me like theirs is still a better deal
Normally all he'll need to do is to make a phone call and say he's getting his 'friend' to bring the car into the shop.
Mind you, if you live in a place with a lot of snow, rust still probably starts to take a toll after about 15 years or so but that's still a big improvement over cars in those places maybe lasting 5 years and 50K miles.
Now I see 1990's Camry's and other cars happily @ 250,000 km without any major engine work.
I had a Honda del Sol from the last year they were made and I had garaged it in the winter for the last 10 years or so. It got to the point that the dealer's mechanics would gather around it when I brought it in because basically none of the cars (which weren't that common anyway) were still on the roads if they were driven in the winter.
I enjoyed it for a long time as a second vehicle. It was also the most reliable vehicle I had owned up to that point. But as I stopped commuting and ended up traveling a lot more I just wasn't using it enough to justify the insurance/registration/etc. cost especially as it hit 170K miles or so and I didn't really rust it for long trips at that point.
(I hadn't driven it in the winter for years.)
https://www.kianiroforum.com/threads/250k-miles-in-3-years.9...
When I was a child, run-in periods and 2 year warranties were the norm. It was a big deal when the Japanese manufacturers started doing standard 3 year warranties.
It really is quite astonishing. And, as cars are loaded up with more and more fragile electronics it will be even more important, I think: when your side mirrors are cameras and screens, for examples, it's pretty important that you don't have a failure taking down your car's usability. Similarly, will it apply to a bug in the ABS firmware?
However, this gives them a huge advantage in the reliability field as what is put into their cars is known/proven/shown to be extremely reliable.
I always chalked up reliability as a function of new tech introduction + focus on reliability. I figured Porsche gets decent numbers because of how relatively low-tech they are and the ridiculous prices they charge for optioning-in that tech (basic things like ACC or memory seats).
Is there something else organizationally, process or product wise that Porsche does differently than the VW group? I do know that they have a separate factory w/ seperate engineering departments (:cough VW engineers design Lamborghini's).
There's a lot of weaknesses that show up a lot quicker when you're holding an engine at redline.
Down to 9/26 from last years 4/26. Compared to VW's 24/26 that's quite a large delta.
TBH some of ranking on the list makes anecdotal sense (Toyota is #2). Others do not (Mazda as #1?!).
I'm questioning Consumer Reports methodology, how far back do they look? If it's only a sliding window of <3yrs I do not believe thats enough data.
https://www.reddit.com/r/cars/comments/nr4awu/which_expensiv...
As a personal anecdote: my 2003 VW (1.8T GTI) had 330,000km when I sold it to a friend (it continues to run strong, but not sure the KMs). I did all the work myself and I did it on time. Biggest repair was AC Compressor, the rest was just routine maintenance and a couple $50 sensors. If a CEL came on I addressed it as soon as possible. At the same time, I had a friend with a similar year Jetta TDI which lit on fire around the 290k mark. Every time I was in her car the CEL was on, and I remember driving it home on a road trip once where you'd hold the pedal to the floor the whole way just to keep it at the highway speed limit.
https://blog.grabcad.com/blog/2018/10/08/porsche-and-lean-ma...
That being said, Tesla went back to early Ford for the full top-down flow system - and it's working for them. So while I love the TPS system and use it in my company, I'm willing to keep on learning.
They share some functions like brake SW or ACC, but they do their own engine and chassis.
Otherwise they source their stuff alone, and due to the low sales number they struggle to find willing suppliers.
Reliability was always a selling point for Porsches relative to their competitor. You could buy a 308 and be constantly fixing it, or a 911 and (so long as you didn't put it in a ditch) you'd have an everyday driver.
The fact that it's dropping suggests that they're feeling the effects of VW's ownership, crapping their designs up.
If I wanted those things, I would go buy a Highlander or other SUV-shaped car lacking the ability to go from pavement to AWD to 4WD to locked diffs if I get really crazy.
I like to call my off-road truck (rig in the vernacular) 'too dumb to hack'. Not that it has any meaningful security, but it is only electronic, there is not enough digital logic for there to be any attack surface worth exploiting, and even if there were some exploit, it cannot do much more than shut down the engine due to faulty timings.
Not to say that Toyota hasn't also experimented with stranger drivetrains, but they generally seem to have branched out less than Honda as an example.
Subaru is a bit of an outlier. Great quality with huge exceptions (NA head gaskets, problematic CVT), and that terrific flat four.
You'd think that people would be willing to pay more for better mileage (and no, it's not due to weight differences of the premium equipment). I know my relative who was looking at hybrid Camrys would have been happy to pay more to have both the best MPG and various other features. Instead, they got the cheap model and added the blind spot monitors and called it a day.
It's worth noting, though, that as fuel efficiency goes up each increment in mpg is less valuable, so 6-7 mpg on a car that already gets 50 mpg is not as useful as 6-7 mpg on a car that gets 20 mpg. This is because the thing you're trying to minimize (fuel burned) is in the denominator of the measure. Countries that measure fuel economy in L/100km don't have this problem. Engineering Explained does a good job of showing how the math works out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLQmwOX6Xds
I completely agree with your assessment of the MPG difference. I tried explaining this to my relative, to no avail. The number for one vehicle was under 50 MPG and the number for the other vehicle was over 50 MPG, so it was a mental sticking point that I could not overcome.
The Prius was ground-breaking work; had Chevron not killed NiMH batteries, they would have been shipping mainstream electric RAV4s in the 90s. Toyota are very happy to innovate where they think they can deliver to a high standard.
I can't imagine warranties actually have that much of an effect when it comes to depreciation.
However, given how much dealerships are pushing longer and longer loan terms as a way of achieving those magical monthly payment numbers, I assume this is a way to justify the practice even further.
Nowadays, Hyundai has about as average a reputation as they come. And not surprisingly, resale value to match.
In comparison, Chrysler has toyed with 10-year warranties by just treating it as a marketing expense. But in their efforts they never really improved in build quality and resale value showed it.
They sold 2017 cars with a time bomb that goes off in 2022, and nothing to do about it. LTE capable devices were around for years at that point.
No mention of it on Toyota Canada or US websites
https://www.moneysense.ca/columns/ask-moneysense/toyota-truc...
They even went so far as to SCAM customers by spraying rusted out frames with polymer compound +over the corrosion_ just to push cars over the warranty period at the lowest cost possible.
https://www.toyotanation.com/threads/frame-corrosion-after-c...
https://www.peugeot.co.uk/owners/assistance-warranty/warrant...
Why lie to people?
I wonder if they intentionally took inspiration from tech companies who skirt repairability
The main warranty is kept if you can show any maintenance records, even receipts for your own oil change materials is enough.
And once a year makes it obvious they want it in a dealership to make sure they're not bankrolling engine replacements for people who'd otherwise let basic maintenance intervals go indefinitely...
I’ve had some terrible experiences with Toyota dealerships in the past. Beyond scummy and scammy.
pre-pandemic we were doing a little less than that.
with WFH, we have only put on 4k in the last 14 months...
kicking myself for not doing a lower KM lease.