Rants and Revelations

In My car, the mother and My car, again, I’ve written a bit about my car, which is leaking oil in a totally un-Toyota-like manner. I took it after that weekend where it used 3 quarts of oil, and they did some sort of consumption test, and told me I needed to bring it back again. That was today. In the meantime, I was determined not to put any oil in it – I wanted them to see how much oil it was losing, and if it ran out of oil and siezed the engine somewhere between here and Oshawa, hopefully I’d get a new engine out of the deal.

No such luck, unfortunately. So I brought it in today, and they say it lost a half a quart of oil in the 600 miles I drove between then and now. That is, to me, excessive. They say that probably just the rings that they put in a month or two ago haven’t seated properly yet, and as they seat the oil consumption will go down. Ok, that’s almost believable. Our flying club once had a plane where they put the rings in one cylinder upside down and so instead of scraping the oil back down into the sump, it was pulling oil into the cylinder. I’m scheduled to go back in a week for another consumption test. Unfortunately I won’t be doing any major long-distance driving in the car in that week. Too bad, another 3 hours at 80-90mph like when I go to Ottawa or Whitby is probably the only way to show excessive oil use in a short time.

On the plus side, now that I have service records of them working on this complaint during the warranty period, if it doesn’t get any better I can pursue a claim even after the warranty period expires.

I’ll rant about my damn hard drives in another post.