Our long-term 2023 Toyota Sienna’s flooring is lastly again intact and never scraping alongside the bottom anymore. You may be questioning, gee, when did that begin? Properly, direct your consideration again to Shopper Editor Jeremy Korzeniewski’s “9 thoughts” replace the place he had the unlucky (and unavoidable) expertise of working over a deer mendacity within the street.
On the time, the harm from that deer did a quantity on the felt shielding that smooths out the underbelly of the Sienna, defending any very important bits down there and offering for a extra aerodynamic profile. An excellent hunk of that flooring overlaying was pulled unfastened by the deer, and relying on the kind of driving you had been doing, may very well be heard scraping alongside the bottom. Not good!
So, I took our van in to the closest Toyota dealership to have the harm assessed and see what wanted to be performed. The service adviser stated that the entire undershield wanted to get replaced and that the entire bolts had been damaged. I used to be quoted $1,732.62 for the job, which included three hours of labor. Not solely that, however the supplier stated that a number of the elements essential had been on nationwide backorder and that if we needed them to do the work (each time the elements got here in), they’d have to cost me for the elements proper then and there.
One thing concerning the quote didn’t sit proper, so I took our van to a special Toyota dealership. They had been a bit confused by the evaluation of the primary supplier and stated that the elements to repair it had been truly in inventory and that they might have them in a few days to treatment the issue. Not solely that, however the supplier additionally advised me that it could solely be about 45 minutes or an hour of labor. The new quote got here out to $712.09, and that’s precisely what we paid after selecting up the automobile all patched up a few days later.
So, if there’s a lesson to be discovered right here, a second opinion by no means hurts. We don’t know if the primary dealership was merely mistaken or taking us for a trip on what all wanted to be performed, however we saved over $1,000 by in search of out a second quote.
The above stated, this story doesn’t finish right here, as a result of a couple of month after we received our long-term Sienna again, one in all our editors walked out to the van to search out that the underbody protect had but once more fallen out. This time, it wasn’t our doing. I picked up the van and headed again to the dealership that put the brand new flooring in for us. They slotted us into their service schedule straight away, recognizing that the problem was maybe on account of an error on their finish. And in the end, that was their evaluation. One of many new bolts they put in to carry the brand new flooring up was mysteriously lacking (maybe not correctly tightened?), inflicting the shielding to droop towards the pavement as soon as once more. With a brand new bolt put in, we went on our merry approach a short while later. After all, we weren’t charged for this additional journey, because the supplier tells us any work they do is underneath guarantee for a yr.
It’s been a few weeks because the flooring restore was patched up, and we have had glad crusing ever since. We don’t have for much longer with our long-term Sienna at this level, however right here’s hoping the ground stays the place it’s presupposed to be for the ultimate months it has left in our fleet.
To learn all of our numerous updates with the long-term 2023 Toyota Sienna Platinum, test this hyperlink out right here.
Associated video:
