My Toyota Story

I was an early adopter of the hybrid car. Well at least the hybrid luxury car with a Lexus RX400H in 2005. And since Lexus and Toyota are basically one and the same, I feel confident calling it a "Toyota story".

It was comfy, the sat nav was super nice and seldom wrong, it got 20% better gas mileage than a "regular" RX300 or RX330. But it did have its problems as well. The very frequent service intervals were always over $400, the paint scratched easily and we had an extremely odd electrical issue predating the current Prius issue.

Now, I was not the typical luxury hybrid user. In three years I put over 60,000 miles on the car. I drove it off road more than once in the desert using the all wheel drive to its utmost. OK, it even gave me the stability warning twice when the car was on two wheels. (by accident, uh huh)

Well one day driving home the Vehicle Stability Control VSC light came on just driving normally, where upon it cut the power to the rear wheels. It did this for a second or two and then drove normally. The next time I put on the brakes the Anti-Lock Braking System ABS light came on and the brake pedal pumped as if I were skidding down the road, not stopping at 10mph in my driveway.

Off and on for weeks the various traction control, VSC and ABS would engage randomly and not for any apparent outside reason. OK, in a $60,000 car this is totally unacceptable. Unless you drive a Mercedes and then maintenance nightmares should be nothing new.

The car spent 5 weeks at the dealer. They changed all the tires and brakes, including all the ABS stuff. No fix. They replaced all the car's computers. Twice. No fix. A corporate engineer from Los Angeles came down to diagnose the cause of the car's problems. Calls and emails were exchanged with engineers from Nippon Denso in Japan. One was even scheduled to fly from Japan just for this issue. (NASA wasn't a consideration for little ol' me evidently)

And then they switched computers in the car again. Fixed. But no one could say how or why it happened or was fixed. Spontaneous remission in the car world? Who knows? They don't and I don't. A little internet searching at the time showed no one else with a 400H had ever had the same issue and only one person had ever had a battery problem at that time.

To me, and unsolved problem in the Prius doesn't seem too far fetched. But I am also willing to bet on the usual "pilot error" of people just being morons.

Time will tell.