One Last Word About Toyota

Through the years, my wife and I have owned Toyotas: 1988(?) Toyota Corolla, 1991 Toyota Camry DX, 1996 Toyota RAV4, and 2002 Toyota Camry XLE.

We stuck to Toyota, mainly for my wife's daily driving, after a carpark incident when a FedEx driver ploughed his van into the backend of my wife's Corolla (estimates showed the driver was doing 40-45MPH in a 15MPH zone).  Although the impact should have crumpled the rearend and possibly turned the petrol tank into a burning inferno, the Toyota crumple zone absorbed most of the impact, saving my wife from serious injury (to complete the description, the FedEx van pulled my wife's car out of her parking space, and pushed it into two other vehicles parked nearby; my wife's head and shoulder hit and broke the driver's side window, causing bruises and some mental anguish).

Therefore, like Volvo drivers, we see Toyota as a safe vehicle for safe drivers.

However, our experience at Toyota repair shops has been less than spectacular.  Seems like the repair shops have hired away service managers from other "push as much crap-to-fix stuff on the customer as possible" repair shops, both foreign and domestic.  A regular oil change, if you're not careful, can turn into a major fix, especially when the local repair shop needs to raise cash to build ever more extravagant-looking quarters that have nothing to do with getting your vehicle maintained and repaired.  A pretty, shiny lemon is still a lemon, is it not?

So, as American politicians continue to waste taxpayers' money pretending to care about their constituents while grilling Toyoda (or before that, HUAC circus performances, MLB owners, bank CEOs, and soon-to-be BCS show producers), it's up to us regular automobile owners to tell repair shop mechanics and managers "enough is enough."  If they offer more than you asked for, tell them "no thank you" and find a reputable local repair shop mechanic who will fix what you asked for and nothing more.  Then and only then can we show we've empowered customers who know a bad dealership/repair shop when we see one.

I've said all I had to say about one automobile manufacturer and its distribution network.  In my experience, all automobile manufacturers and their distributors do about the same thing to their customers, if you don't watch out and stop being a passive sheep.