Quote:
Originally Posted by mesooohoppy
toyota is not bound by any way shape or form to any change petitions. if we are being honest here they could care less.
those petitions are more effective on getting an individual or a small business/org to cave to whatever the petition wants, usually on a local level (with enough signatures and angry mom facebook posts). not trying to get a giant corporation to warranty your steering wheel. if your car is still under warranty, take it to the dealer. if its not, get it re wrapped by someone who knows what they are doing.
an effective way to do this is figure out whatever you need to do to get a claim filed with the appropriate division in the NTHSA. i dont remember the process, but if this really is an issue you claim to be and you can get enough people to submit whatever NTHSA wants, they will look into it. sorry for the lack of specifics, ive read the process in the past and have forgotten what the details are.
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Kinda-sorta.
If you have a
safety related issue, then you can - and should - file a complaint with
NHTSA. After enough complaints (usually several hundred unless there are accidents) then they will open an investigation. An alternative is to petition for an investigation citing multiple complaints. One recent petition that led to the preliminaries for an investigation was a stalling issue on 2019 manual transmission VW GTI and Jetta models. The petitioner waited until about a 150 people had submitted complaints with NHTSA and wrote a very compelling petition.
This started the preliminary process where NHTSA contacted VW and said "give us all the data you have on complaints about this and we'll decide if this warrants an investigation". VW requested an extension to submit the required information citing the need to translate some documents from German.
Meanwhile, VW engineers appear to have diagnosed the issue and came up with a "service action" that was sent to all affected owners to have a software reflash done. It looks like the software fix actually resolves the problem, but customers were beating their heads against the brick wall of VW for months before NHTSA got vW's attention.
That said, this was a documented safety complaint and I'd be hard pressed to turn a peeling steering wheel cover into a safety defect - but owners can certainly try. I've seen far more foolish things in the NHTSA database.
The link above goes directly to the complaint form at NHTSA for filing safety complaints.
If you are under warranty and a repair is denied by the dealer, then I'd open a case with Toyota, possibly by a letter, requesting a repair. I'd cite the multitude of complaints here and I think that you will get it fixed.