I had an interesting “outside the box” experience today with the 4Runner. For reasons unknown, I listened to a buddy of mine and took it in to another service center to have it looked at. The prognosis on first glance looked grim: this truck looked like, acted like, and smelled (yes, it actually smelled) dead.
Then something miraculous happened: they called me today and said that it was mostly fixed*. How could this be? Surely it was a mistake. So I zip over to the garage, listen to the whole story skeptically, pay my roughly $530 and take it for a test drive. And it works! I don’t know how, but this little garage just took a $7500 repair job and replaced it with about $600 worth of work.
I’m still not sure exactly what happened, but is seems like the Toyota dealership screwed me on the last service visit. It’s not like this doesn’t happen often (this is me we’re talking about) but in this case the screw up was so bad it could have ended with the 4Runner destroyed or in an accident. As one co-worker puts it, “this sucks rocks.” Looks like a rant session at the dealership is in order soon.
*Long story just a bit longer is, with one more service visit (and another $400 out of pocket) the 4Runner should be back to normal. It was some sort of combination of shot timing belt, broken cog/gear thing at the front of the engine/transmission, and a whole lot of misfiring that caused the truck to act dead. Now it’s running as good (if not better) than it ever did. One more part replacement should take it off the critical list. Moral: never believe the dealership, ever. Lesson relearned again.