Should You Be Concerned With the Toyota Recall? Here's Why or Why Not...

Floor Mats That Kill? It May or May Not Be a Problem For You...

By now, you may have heard about Toyota having the largest recall in it's history yesterday. As a Service Advisor that has worked for Toyota, and an owner of one of the affected cars, I was intersted enough to check the details. Hopefully , this will assuage your fears, or cause you to take the necessary action, which isn't much... Time to eliminate the hysteria....Or see if you're one of the 3.8 million victims of TFMI (Toyota Floor Mat-Itis). Swine Flu didn't get me, but a defective floor mat did....

First question: do you own the following vehicles: 2007-2010 Camry, 2005-2010 Avalon, 2004-2009 Prius, 2005-2010 Tacoma, 2007-2010 Tundra, 2007-2010 Lexus ES350, 2006-2010 Lexus IS250 and IS350? No ? Well, then you're fine - feel free to smoke and eat a Whopper. You do? Well, I hate to say it, but you're gonna die....

Of course not ! If you do own one of these, go out to the car right now, and see what kind of floor mats you have. We'll wait......... OK. Are they cloth mats, or all-season rubber mats? If they're cloth, you're fine. The cloth mats are held in place by a hook in the back and about 1000 divots undeneath to keep it from moving. If you have a rubber factory or dealer bought mat, go back out and bring it here. Yes, we'll wait again.......OK. Take the mat and throw it away or put it in the trunk. Hey, don't bitch about it, just do it. Jeez ........

What's wrong with the mat. Well, flor mats are supposed to protect the carpets from getting dirty, but they didn't keep them from avoiding drink spills, so they started making them with a big lip around the outside high enough to hold a Big Gulp. Now, you see all those different models? Those cars interiors are nothing like each other, but Toyota made one generic mat for all of them, and that lip to hold the spill was high enough to possibly get caught over the accelerator, flooring the gas pedal down. Don't aks me how people do this, but somehow 5 people were killed in accidents from this. Yep, five people died because a bunch of haus frau's didn't want to clean up a dirty carpet...

Now, if you would rather get instructions from someone else, feel free to call the Service Department of your local Toyota or Lexus dealer. I'm sure they would be glad to explain it to you, along with the OTHER 75 people that are calling about the same thing.....

.