Toyota dealer blows up engine

[slowstride]

Three weeks ago a check engine light came up on my wife's generation 5 4Runner.

I had the codes read at an auto parts store. The codes seemed to be associated with the cam position sensor.

I immediately took it to the local Toyota dealer, for diagnosis and repair. Several days later we were contacted by the Toyota dealer, informing us that they could not find anything wrong with the vehicle, despite test driving the vehicle several times.

My wife went to pick the 4Runner up and, as soon as she started driving, the check engine light came back on. She immediately returned it to Toyota’s Service Department.

The Toyota dealer then tested the cam position sensor and determined that it appeared to be functioning correctly.

Their next step was to take apart the top of the engine to determine if the cam chain had jumped a tooth. They got to the camshafts and determined that the timing was correct. So they reassembled the engine.

The next step was to swap out the cam timing valve assembly and see if that corrected the problem. The Toyota technician then took it for a test drive and the engine failed, blowing a hole in the side of the block.

The engine is now destroyed. Engine replacement is looking to be $10,000 - $20,000. The Toyota dealer is not accepting liability for destroying our engine.

I have met with the owner of the dealership. His best offer is to provide the labor to replace the engine without charge. We would be paying for parts, which would be about $9,000 for a used engine or about $15,000 for a new engine.

The 4Runner is a 2010 with less than 100,000 miles on the odometer, and has had oil changes at 5,000 mile intervals. This was the first time this vehicle had in for repair. Aside from oil changes, nobody had touched this engine prior to this work being done by the Toyota dealer.

We took the vehicle to a Toyota dealer because we wanted this to be correctly diagnosed and repaired before any damage occurred to the engine. We did not expect the vehicle to be repeatedly test driven until the engine failed.

We are currently considering what our next move might be. I would be interested to hear input from 4Runner forum members. Has anybody had experience using an auto repair Attorney?

 

[NuclearN8]

Call Toyota customer service

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[Teamoatmealpie]

You might want to invest in an hour of attorney time with some one qualified on an issue such as this.

FedEx hit my parked car once and the implied threat (letter from atty) of long drawn out legal action and legal fees on their side made for a quick settlement.

Really sorry to hear about your situation - that sounds like they are responsible for a bad attempted repair.

 

[oljedi11950]

Use of lawyer always expedites the process ! Their mech blew the job on rebuild come on ! Yep lawyer up .. cost
s you some upfront $$ but imo cheaper in long run !

 

[philsey]

Random thoughts - not intending to bust yer chops.

Realistically, you are well outside your 5/60 PT wty. So, does Toyota bear any responsibility. No, but squeaky wheel ....

Dealer has admitted/accepted some degree of responsibility in standing the labor for the engine replacement. You could do a lot worse. Certainly work them a little further for something free/or cheap to drive. You ARE going to be without wheels a while.

Face it, something was wrong with your engine, and you'd have been TOTALLY on the hook for whatever the diagnosis turned out to be -- likely $$thousands$$ IMO. Doubt you'd have come out of this cheaply, even if it had been done to perfection. It could have been as simple as a defective sensor, but that's now devolved totally to speculation, unfortunately.

Attorney? Well, you could spend $200 to explore that. That could be a real protracted ordeal. 6 - 12 months from now, a jury may make you whole, after all it did blow up after their work, in their hands. If I were a juror, I'd award you a new 4R at a price less the full retail value of the old one. Plus atty fees, plus rental fees, plus some PITA compensation amount. This could take a year.

Then again, a skillful letter from a gifted atty? Who knows?

My inclination is to work Toyota for a good price on the engine, and move on.

Do not forget the power of social media. Toyota does not want their 'reliability' rep sullied in the public eye.

Sorry for your problem.

 

[Newbeans]

Use of lawyer always expedites the process ! Their mech blew the job on rebuild come on ! Yep lawyer up .. cost
s you some upfront $$ but imo cheaper in long run !

Hopefully there is an easy way to get it fixed in a timely manner without litigation. I vote for contacting customer service like another user mentioned. Lawyer up as a last resort.

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[TEujunga]

Ugh, that's rough. Sorry for your situation.

As I see it, the issue would seem to be determining whether the engine would have suffered the same catastrophic failure if you had just ignored the warning light and not taken it in for diagnosis, or if the failure was due to a error the techs made in replacing parts and reassembling the engine in an effort to diagnose the problem, or in their test-drive procedure.

The chances of getting it solved through Toyota Customer Service would seem to be slim, but there's no harm in trying that first -- you might get lucky!

Otherwise, I agree with others that eventually, using every weapon at your disposal (legal threats, flooding social media, letters to consumer advocacy groups and the BBB, etc.) in an effort to coerce Toyota into paying for everything may become necessary, although it's an unpleasant and time-consuming process.

Good luck!

 

[JpAdct]

Here's another option to consider, although obviously not the first choice. Tell the dealer to give you top trade in value for your 4Runner (without the engine damage deduction) towards invoice on a new vehicle. You get a good deal and they get a new car sale. Not ideal, but another negotiation tactic you might want to think about.

Best of luck, if they screw you and nothing works, send me your GoFundMe account for the new engine! I'd throw a couple of beers worth of $$ to help a brother out.


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[BlackWorksInc]

That sucks, plain and simple. From what you're describing it's hard to assign blame here without a bit more detail.

For the most part it sounds like the dealership/technician did everything above boards despite having an intermittent/hard to verify issue. A Technician can't do anything unless they can verify an issue, if the issue is not occurring at the time the technician is diagnosing it; there isn't a whole lot they can do. So hearing them try, fail to verify, and give it back to you only to have the MIL pop on as you pick it up sounds rather on par for an intermittent issue. God knows how many times I've had a vehicle, had to give it back to the customer with a sheepish "we couldn't verify it at this time, please bring it back when it's doing it" and they drive not even off the driveway before the damn car decides to make me look like a twit.

The one part here that is a bit confusing to me though is this line here:

...
The next step was to swap out the cam timing valve assembly and see if that corrected the problem. The Toyota technician then took it for a test drive and the engine failed, blowing a hole in the side of the block.
...

So it sounds like they swapped out one of the cam phaser assemblies (unless we're talking the VVTi solenoid?), I believe to do that the timing cover has to come off, which means the engine has to come out to do that. Which is about 20hrs of labor to pull the engine. It might be possible to slip that phaser out without taking the timing cover off, but I can't remember off the top of my head.

But more importantly, I don't see a clear correlation between then fiddling with the top of the engine and then it suddenly blowing a hole in the side of the block. That's usually something like a rod bearing or piston rod giving out, not something that's typically caused by top-end work (though a valve impacting a piston head and causing it to jam up is possible).

So unfortunately this might not be something the dealership did, but it's very hard to say without more information here.

Just to give you an idea, I recently had a '93 LC come in and want to basically reseal the entire engine with over a quart million miles on it. In my parts quote I had neglected to suggest a new timing chain (in this particular case to reseal a timing cover you have to remove the cylinderhead, which means touching the chain). Engine went back together fine, customer drove away and a week later the vehicle was towed in because the chain had snapped. It wasn't really my fault the chain snapped, we double checked everything I did and determined that the most likely culprit was that the guides had become dried and brittle since I had the engine on a stand and fractured and disintegrated. The job wasn't to rebuild the customer's engine but to reseal it, but hind-sight being 20/20 I should have recommended a new timing chain, guides, and probably sprockets to cover my ass in case his 250k+ 20yr+ old engine did decide to grenade. Long story short, we bit the bullet and I put a new chain and parts, re-resealed the engine and the customer is happily driving around now, we could have just left it up to the customer (and in this case the guy was very understanding and willing to pony up to redo all the work to fix the vehicle, but we decided to hold to our principles in this case and cover him).

Sometimes bad things happen and it's unfortunate, without any real information; it kind of sounds like maybe this particular engine wasn't doing so well in it's old age and may have given up the ghost coincidentally. But again, that's just based on what you've presented us so far, I just have seen enough shit go sideways because someone ****ed up and because shit just goes sideways sometimes to be cautious with throwing blame around until we determine what the failure and it's cause was. So if we can get a bit more information going, we might be able to get a rough idea of what happened and how to help you going forward.

 

[Quentin]

Bad oil pressure can cause the cam timing assemblies to not function. Wonder if the oil pump was shitting the bed which caused the VVT to not work which caused the cam position CEL. Bad oil pump is also not so good for crank and rod lubrication.

Also, as said above, the timing chain cover has to come off to remove the cam timing assemblies. The oil pump is in the timing chain cover, too, so o-rings could have been left off during the reassembly. There is a big seal between the main oil hole and timing chain cover. That would be my lead culprit.


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[mrblah]

I'd lawyer up, mainly because engine blew up when it was in the dealer's possession. I'd also have the lawyer deal with the dealer and toyota. The more you talk the more you will affect the outcome. You may not want to believe it, but the moment that engine blew up. that dealer is preparing for litigation, so you should be really careful what words come out of your mouth.

I'm not a lawyer, but I work in a litigous environment (i.e. people love to try n sue my employer).

 

[slowstride]

As I understand it ' cam timing valve assembly' is the Toyota parts description for the sensor that was reading the cam shaft position error. I don't think there was any disassembly of anything beyond the rocker covers?
Work may well have been coming for this engine, but we weren't expecting to have to replace an engine.
I have contacted Toyota, maybe they can help with the parts....

 

[JpAdct]

Work may well have been coming for this engine, but we weren't expecting to have to replace an engine.

I think this has a few of us a little nervous. This engine failing at 100,000 miles is a scary thought.



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[nvbirdman]

It ran when you took it in, it doesn't run now. An attorney will not only hit them for his fees, plus a new engine, plus a rental car until your car is returned in running order.
I knew a girl who was in an accident and the other guy's insurance company was taking their time until they freaked out when they found out she was still driving a rental.

 

[shahsmerdis]

I'd get toyota corp one chance as everyone said first while you research a lawyer to help you. Once to mention lawyer I'm sure they will stop talking to you and lawyer up themselves. peaceful yet firm.

 

[Quentin]

As I understand it ' cam timing valve assembly' is the Toyota parts description for the sensor that was reading the cam shaft position error. I don't think there was any disassembly of anything beyond the rocker covers?
Work may well have been coming for this engine, but we weren't expecting to have to replace an engine.
I have contacted Toyota, maybe they can help with the parts....

The cam timing valve assembly is not a sensor. It is a solenoid attached to a spool valve. It moves back and forth between 2 positions (in the 1GR anyway -- 2GR FKS has a linear position solenoid that allows the 3 different positions for the valve timing). In one position, the spool valve allows oil to flow into one passage where it goes into one side of a rotor assembly that changes the angular position of the camshaft relative to the timing. The other spool valve position moves oil into the other passage that pushes oil onto the other side of the rotor and that turns the cam back to the original position. There is an actual cam sensor that verifies that the camshaft is reacting correctly to the signal sent to the 'cam timing valve assembly'. Both of those parts are on the head cover (rocker cover as you call it). The cam timing gear (the rotor assembly that I mentioned above) is what I thought you meant they were swapping out. That does require the timing chain cover.

Cam timing gear:

Cam timing valve assembly (aka oil control valve):

Cam angle sensor:

The overall system:

If they really just changed out the OCV or CAS, that should have nothing to do with the short block side of it and the short block failure. That said, this engine shouldn't be any $9k or anything like that. car-part.com shows tons of them for under $4k.

 

[c10bonanza]

The cost the dealer is quoting you for a new engine or parts sounds like retail, not the dealer's cost. Demand the dealer fix it for its cost. Sounds like you had a bad issue to begin with which was exacerbated by the tech's inability to diagnose. You would likely be paying for repairs or replacement had the engine not crapped out once the problem was identified, so this would be a fair and equitable resolution for both sides.

 

[ToyoT4R]

Similar case on expertlaw.com:

https://www.expertlaw.com/forums/showthread.php?t=193685&highlight=dealer+damaged+my+car

 

[BlackWorksInc]

[MENTION=72319]slowstride[/MENTION]

It sounds like they were switching out the OCV for the VVTi system then, as [MENTION=48413]Quentin[/MENTION] mentioned it's a fairly simple thing to do and would not affect the bottom end of the engine at all. We've done this in the past before for VVTi issues (in fact in some cases because of the wiring harness we can swap connectors to manually actuate a VVTi test to rule out a harness issue and narrow the culprit down to a OCV). Unfortunately if that's what they did, it sounds like Quentin is probably right with his theory that there was an oiling issue in the engine prior to you bringing it to the dealer. It's possible that they may have exacerbated or agitated the condition further, but it's more of a "she done gave up the ghost" situation rather than someone blowing her up.

That quote for the engine is in the ballpark for a "new" engine, Toyota doesn't sell crate motors. So you buy a "new" Toyota engine you start with a short block and add EVERYTHING ala-carte. Want a cylinderhead? Sure! Valves, springs, the locating pins that fit in the cylinder head to line stuff up? That's extra! Makes for even more fun when you're doing crap under warranty... but that's a different story.

Bottom line, what's the breakdown here? We talking $9~11k for a "New" factory fresh engine composed of buckets of parts, or are we talking a junkyard motor thrown in with labor included? One is about right, the other seems a bit high (labor should be in the 15~20hr range for a swap, which at about $120/hr is between $1800~2400 in labor, which if the engine is being picked up for about 4k is still leaving a large gap in price that's unaccounted for.)

In this case it's probably unlikely that the dealership or Toyota will cover everything as it's more of a "bad luck" situation rather than anything that could be definitively tied to them in regards to fault (sort of like going to the doctor because you think you have heartburn, having a massive coronary while he's checking your blood pressure and dying). But that doesn't mean you shouldn't at least try and see what you can get in regards to assistance. I mean the dealership now has a dead, non-op vehicle on their lot that they have to deal with and I'm sure they'd rather get some money out of you for the trouble rather than see you tow it away. I'd start with tempering your frustration and being calm, but adamant about your point of view. The less reason you give them to treat you like a "crazy customer" the more you have going on your side if you have to take it above their heads, if they're the ones being rude and flippant; it works in your favor, if you're the one being rude and flippant you're probably going to get blown off.

 

[themuffinman619]

Curious if this has been resolved yet