GR Corollas Burning

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Happy Friday All,

This week’s story that I thought was most interesting and most concerning to the car community was what is happening to the Toyota GR Corollas.

Recently within the span of a few months two different GR Corollas have spontaneously caught on fire.

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Now some would claim 2 corollas on fire is not much of a story and normally I’d agree. However there 2 important points:

1. This is a not a high volume production vehicle (relative to other Toyotas)

2. Toyotas response to these incidents and what precedent this sets for other incidents with other manufacturers

A lot of what I am covering came from a video by Alex Martini which you can find here.

The flammable nature of these cars is concerning but its not why I was disturbed by this story. Its the statements Toyota said for why they wouldn’t cover these cars under warranty. You can go through the video to get the actual quote but they basically said “because at some point the vehicle went over 85mph they did not have to honour the warranty.” Which is wild to me.

And this brings up a deeper issue with a lot of newer vehicles that you as a consumer should know. Your car is currently tracking all of your data and sending it to third parties and you have “defaulted in agreeing to send this data simply by purchasing the vehicle.”

I wouldn’t be surprised if someone in the future in some state put forward public policy that would prevent manufacturers from doing this but in some areas it is going the opposite direction. California will join the EU in ensuring vehicles are reporting to insurance agencies if your vehicle goes more than 1 mph.

There are a few sites you can go lookup that does allow you to ‘opt-out’ of having your data tracked but more commonly the way to do this is to go into the app of of the manufacturer you have purchased (if they have one) and go into the settings of ‘account>data privacy>your vehicle>manage consent’ or some variation of those steps.

If you were considering getting a GR corolla then maybe this will change your mind but this issue of data is going to be prevalent in all new manufacturers. And it also a good reminder based on what happened to these two guys that gap insurance is usually recommended.

Thanks,

Steven C