The Toyota Gods Are Angry

We bought a new 2009 Toyota Sienna back in late April. It's a really cool vehicle (if you're into minivans, that is). I like it a lot.

I'm starting to wonder, however, if it was assembled on a sacred Native American burial ground or by an angry voodoo priestess in Louisiana. I'm pretty sure it is cursed.

It started on Father's Day weekend, when I was taking my dad to dinner and showing off our new van to him for the first time. I wrote about it in much more detail here, but in a nutshell, our brand new van--with all of 2200 miles on it--broke down on our way to the restaurant, and I had to have it towed to the dealership. Apparently at some point, we had run over something that crushed a coolant line, draining all of the antifreeze and overheating the engine. About $720 later (including the tow), we had the van back.

Two months later, in late August, I was driving down the road, minding my own business, when out of nowhere, a rock flew into the windshield. A $45 attempt to repair the windshield failed in less than two hours. The new windshield cost an additional $330.

The Mrs. took Olivia and June to her parents' house about a week ago, and while she was there, her dad noticed that we have damage to our rear bumper. It's puzzling damage, as neither the Mrs. or I have backed into anything, but the damage is rather low on the bumper. My best guess is that someone clipped it in a parking lot, but we have no idea when or where it happened, and whatever hit it had to have had a really low bumper. We still haven't quite figured out what could have done that sort of damage. The damage appeared to only be cosmetic, though, so with the holidays looming, I wasn't in any hurry to get it fixed. Besides, I figured, with the luck we've been having with this van, someone is bound to rear-end me during the first snowfall. Then someone else's insurance can pay for a new bumper.

But yesterday morning, the Mrs. reported that something was leaking from the back of the van, right by the rear tire on the side where the bumper was damaged. It was a reddish-brown liquid, and there was a considerable puddle of it. Why it took a week from the time that my father-in-law spotted the damage and who-knows-how-long from the time the van was hit to start leaking is another mystery. Chuck speculated that it was either brake fluid or transmission fluid. Having either of those leaking is not good, especially when the Sienna is the primary vehicle that we use to transport Olivia and June.

So rather than relying on someone to tag me on a slippery road this winter, I took it in to the dealership today. The fluid was from the heating system, and the total repairs for the line and the bumper repair will be $440.

For those of you scoring at home, that's a total of $1535 that we have put into this van in just over six months. I'm quite confident that we put nowhere NEAR that kind of money into our Dodge Grand Caravan that we had for seven years before buying the Sienna, and that includes the new set of tires we put on the Caravan.

The really, really frustrating part of all of this is that it's not Toyota's craftsmanship that is failing us. The wheels aren't falling off. The electronics aren't failing. There isn't a draft because the doors don't hang right. The stereo works.

We just can't seem to avoid road debris, flying rocks, and whatever the hell hit the back of our van.

It also seems to come in every-two-month spurts. We bought the van in April, had the first incident in June, had the broken windshield in August, and discovered the most current damage in early November.

If some SOB plows into the back of me in January and wipes out my $440 bumper, I'm going to be sooooooo pissed.