| T O P I C R E V I E W |
| enetec |
Posted - 23 Jun 2005 : 18:59:03
Hi, as you probably already know, MR2 MKIII Spyder MY2000 and some MY2003 have a pre-cats issue.
Pre-cats are two small catalytic converters inserted on manifolds before main "cat" that help to reduce emission on first minutes of engine running at cold.
Problem is that in that position pre-cats are exposed to a lot of vibration and heat and so, since they are made of ceramic (and not of metal as they should have been IMHO...) they after some time (and kilometers) for some reason begin to "disgregate" first on upper side (and, oddly, often the right one first!).
This small ceramic fragment have no way to go out and so first or later they are sucked back in cylinders making a lot of damages (piston rings at first, then bearings, rods and so on.
Sometime there has been cases where the engine litteraly explodes without any advice, probably since a bigger fragment which goes to interfere with one valve (and so when piston go up.... booom!!!  ).
These are facts. In US on Spyderchat forum there are a lot of well documented cases about this issue. Even in Italy we had, on our community, at least three or four cases and a lot of people who have removed their pre-cat "just in time" (they were showing first sign fo disgregation, right first... like me!  ) or just after... (with some oil consumption as first signal and a dark color of it even after low mileage).
Problem is that Toyota have not done a "recall program" in any country since what I know, probably because of high costs needed to resolve this issue (it seems they reduced this using different pistons rings on MY2003 - this because it seems oil leakage could helps cats to disgregate... - and so you can imagine what are costs needed for this operation on tousends of cars - no new pre-cats type since what we know).
BUT on different countries they adopted different policies: in Italy they declare at any ask that "they are not informed of this issue and that, anyway, they thanks for the message". No more. 
On car still on warranty (3 years in Italy) they seem to have always done all reparation needed on warranty with no customer charge.
BUT out of warranty period there has been people charged for half of the total amount  and people who has been charged for full amount of reparation, even more than EURO 6,000.00!!!
On US, since what I know they seem to not charge customer even if car is out of warranty, and even if the issue happens more than a time on the same car!!
What we would like to have on this survey is a large list of cases from a lot of countries with this type of descripton:
Car year:
Mileage (when the issue happens):
Country:
Brief description of what happens to the engine:
If possible a breif list of pieces changed
On or out of warranty
Customer charged or not (and if so, for what amount)
This to well understand what are "positions" of different Toyota importers in different contries. (e.g. we have no idea on what they do on Japan where there is their factory!)
Some pics of partially disgregated pre-cats:
(courtesy of Spydermagazine.com) |
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