Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc. Prius Shortcomings on software upgrades Torrance, California

19th of Nov, 2011 by User984685

I have elected to file this complaint against Toyota Motors themselves as it is not a local service dealerâ€™s responsibility.
Just the other night I was on my way to a dance and all of the warning lights came on in my 2005 Prius and the engine shut down. I coasted to a stop and found that I still had electric so I drove to a close gas station on that power. The warnings, without even checking my manual, I knew meant that it was a serious problem and that I shouldnâ€™t drive the vehicle. Fortunately, I wasnâ€™t too far from home so I arranged to have a friend pick me up. I arranged for towing to a dealer the next day. When we got the car there the service manager made diagnosing my problem high priority and got right on to figure out just what was the cause of the problem.
As it turns out there is a P2195 failure condition which caused these warnings. It is an AF sensor (fuel). It indicates poor performance. This was not a serious failure requiring immediate shutdown of the vehicle. There is a software upgrade for this which this service manager installed and charged me $45 for. This did not fix the problem it only changed the warnings to â€œcheck engineâ€, a much lesser urgency alert. Clearly, this software upgrade had not just been released. Toyota had learned and seen this problem before and became apparent with the advancing age of the Priuses.
At the core of this complaint is the Toyota policy of not providing itsâ€™ customers with the latest software as a part of servicing. As someone who works on high technology products I can understand how, with the passage of time that improvements need to get made in the software of these complicated systems. So, minor changes are made.
As a regular Toyota customer who always brought my car in to a Toyota dealer for the 5000 mile servicing I expect better and even though it might not be a 2 minute task and trivial it should be done. After all it meant that I had to pay to get my car towed and it ruined an evening. It could have been much worse. I could have been two hours from home requiring a hotel stay in the middle of a snow storm.
Now, with the upgrade I am getting the â€œcheck engineâ€ alert which is meaning a replacement of this sensor. It is a $365 job, $270 for the sensor and the rest for labor. $270 for a sensor? Sorry, that does not compute. That is a Ripoff.

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