A five-year-old Lexus hybrid with about 80,000 km on the clock that starts rough and shakes a little at idle is not a worn-out engine. On this ticket the whole problem came down to spark plugs run past their service…
A RAV4 that creaks over speed bumps and wears the inner edges of its rear tyres is rarely a worn-out suspension. The four faults below are the ones this model actually throws up in service, and in most of them…
The Lexus LS500h is built around quietness, comfort and smoothness, which is why the first sign of trouble is usually a sound rather than a warning light. Between roughly 60,000 and 120,000 km, a share of these flagship hybrids begin…
A RAV4 that spins the tachometer past 3,000 rpm while the speedometer holds at 80 km/h is not automatically a dead gearbox. The car in this ticket had covered just over 60,000 km, and the whole repair came down to…
White smoke from the exhaust and a coolant reservoir that keeps emptying on a RAV4 or Camry with the 2.5 L Dynamic Force engine point at one component more often than anywhere else: the water-cooled EGR cooler. The failure is…
A Mark X that drinks oil is rarely a worn-out engine, and the 280,000 km example below is the proof. The block came out with the factory cross-hatch still on the cylinder walls and the crank journals still clean, yet…
A flickering engine lamp on a Camry is one of the few Toyota warnings that should not be driven around, because the same condition that misfires a cylinder can cook the catalytic converter if it goes on long enough. The…
Lexus hybrids are built to fail quietly, and when a warning lamp does light up the fault is usually smaller than the message implies. The ticket below began as a yellow warning lamp and a soft accelerator, and it closed…
Three Highlander tickets from the same shop, each with a different culprit and none of them the one the warning lamps pointed to. The fault codes and measurements are kept as recorded. The platform in all three is the third-generation…
Four Toyota repair tickets where the component that fixed the car was not the one the symptom pointed to. The fault codes, engine speeds, and mileage figures below are kept as the workshop recorded them, because for a parts buyer…