1993 Toyota Camry V6 GX Sport from UK and Ireland - Comments

The automatic gearbox suffered a catastrophic failure at just 80,000 miles. A Toyota replacement gearbox was quoted at £5000 plus VAT, over 23 % of the cost of the car when new. Stark choice of throwing the car away or spending the money. Total 'rip off'. The Car in Front is a prospective second mortgage. Have written to Toyota UK and complained, they replied in a dismissive way. I do not expect major components to fail at relatively low mileages on 'top of range' models and if they do I do not expect to pay almost a quarter of the cost of the whole car to effect a repair.

I intend to generate as much publicity about this as possible and to conduct an independent survey on the cost of repairs/parts to Toyota's. Can you supply any useful web addresses to effect this?

Wow! I was just about to part with cash for a similar car. Didn't Toyota offer some form of explanation for the gearbox failure?

Problems can occur on every type of car, even the most reliable. There are lemons out there. It's too bad you experienced this, and there is just no excuse for that bad treatment from Toyota. But in general Toyota's are just not unreliable cars, and I don't think you'll ever going to be able to prove that they are, as there already have been done a lot of independent surveys made in many countries, that state that Toyota is above average to extremely reliable cars. But once in a while people can get unlucky, and get a bad car, even from Toyota. I know a lot of people who have Toyota's, without experiencing ANY problems at all with them, cars with high mileage. Of course that doesn't help you much, as you obviously had a lot of problems, but Toyota's are in general of high quality. Very reliable cars.

It's true unfortunately.

One of my relatives had a 91 Mercedes, which was garaged 90% of the time, hardly driven once a week... (cheap guy). Anyways, the transmission completely failed at about 40K miles.

Do you think that's a good reason to make people stop buying BENZes?

Yes! Anything on a car that cost as much as the repair of a transmission I think should be built to last the life time of at least one owner.