Buyer Beware: Huge paint defect on brand new Yaris

[voodoo22]

I went to the dealership first thing Monday morning and talked to my Salerep. He brought out the service manager and they hummed and hawed. After much conversation between them, they asked me if I had time to go to their collision centre.

I went to the collision centre and showed the paint damage to another Toyota employee. They looked at and used a cleaner to really clean the car and look for other damage. Sure enough, there were hundreds of chips all over the plastic silver thing over the license plate, the Toyota emblem on the back, and the rear light cases. The people in the shop all came over to take a look. Against my better judgment they tried buffing it out. I didn't understand how you could buff out a chip which goes right to the steel, but they tried anyways. That just made it worse. Now, not only was there a series of chips, but the clear coat was almost removed where they tried buffing. Everyone at the shop said there was no way they could repaint this and fix it because there was so much damage. Almost the entire passenger side starting by the passenger mirror, rear of the car and I only saw one chip on the driver’s side rear. Almost all the chips are within a band up to the door handles and about 1 foot below and on the back of the trunk from the top to the license plate. There is almost zero damage outside of this band.

It's very suspicious damage as the chips are all really small and there are no large ones. The collision centre said it was almost like someone spun the tires on a gravel road, but then why only on one side of the car, no damage above or below this band and only small chips? If it was gravel you would thing the damage would be more sprayed like the dust you get on the side of your after a rain when you drive through puddles. Also, you would think the chips would vary in size from small to large; they only seem to go from really small to nearly invisible.

So I had the guy at the body shop call the dealer and I waited there until I heard him do this. Then I went back to the dealer and started talking with my salerep. Up until this point neither one of us has even mentioned what the other wanted. I wanted a new car, but I hadn't said this and I had the feeling he was leaning towards a new car as well. He said he needed to call Toyota Canada and that the person he needed to talk to wasn't in today and would it be ok if he took until tomorrow to tell me what they would do for us. I said ok, he thanked me for taking the time for them to gather the information and for the inconvenience and I was getting ready to leave. Then the dealership manager came out and tried saying how they were going to sand down the car and repaint it. That's when I let them know this would be unacceptable. I said this is a brand new car and you can't start repainting it. You will lower the value of the car dramatically; the colours won't match and will fade at a different rate, not to mention the quality would be much lower than the factory. Then he said the most ridiculous thing, he said that I was lucky the chips were so small because they weren't visible unless you looked extremely closely. Lucky? I said that they will be more than visible in a year or two when the car is covered in rust.

This is when I discovered my salesrep had some power because he was getting upset and said to the manager, let's have a talk in private to him. They walked away; the manager got ticked off and walked away. My salesperson I bought from came back and said, "You're getting a new car identical to this one, you can drive this Yaris until your new car is ready on Friday." We signed some paperwork regarding transfer of ownership to the new Yaris coming in Friday, I thanked him profusely and I left happy.

What I didn't tell you is that all the people I dealt with (Salesrep, Service Manager, and Collision centre tech); except for the manager; were Japanese. I come from Western Canada and I find the standards of service in the GTA to be abhorrent. I am German Canadian. I have been lucky enough to have gone to Japan. The Japanese people give amazing service, far beyond anything I have every experienced and in Japan there is no such thing as a tip. There is no space on the bill for a tip in any circumstance. I feel that I was really lucky to have dealt with all Japanese people in this experience. I can't believe how quickly and fairly they resolved our problem.

On a side note, we were originally supposed to receive our car this Friday, but for some reason we got this damaged one last week. Now we're getting one on the prior mentioned delivery date. I think we're getting the car we were ordered and perhaps someone tried to pawn off a car they knew was damaged on our salesperson.

Who knows what happened to this Yaris, but come Friday my Wife and I will be very excited to pick up our new Yaris after we examine it with a magnifying glass!

Thanks for all the support in this forum, this has indeed been a learning experience.