CHARLOTTE — Anna Greene keeps her Toyota RAV4 clean and shiny. She cares how it looks, so it rubs her the wrong way even more that the paint keeps chipping.
“It started with one little bitty spot and then it just started peeling off from there,” she told Action 9′s Jason Stoogenke. One spot turned into multiple spots.
“Kind of makes me sick,” she said.
Toyota knows about the problem. It even has a Customer Support Program for it. It covers the colors that appear to be chipping. More specifically, two shades of white: “Blizzard Pearl” and “Super White.”
Greene has “Blizzard Pearl” and says she paid extra for it. “Because it’s pretty. It’s sparkly,” she said.
Toyota says the problem is sunlight “degrades the adhesion” between the paint primer layer and another layer “causing the paint to peel from the metal.”
The company will repaint the panel that’s chipping for free. Greene says Toyota did, but she wishes the company would repaint her whole SUV with paint that doesn’t have this issue. “I feel it’s unfair because if you put the paint on the same year and the same way as you did on the front fender, it’s going to eventually come off the back fender,” she said.
Stoogenke asked the automaker about that. All it said was it is “committed to customer satisfaction.”
If your Toyota has this problem:
- Take it to the dealership.
- The dealer should fix it for free if it’s the right color.
- Obviously, it doesn’t qualify if something else damaged the paint, such as a car wreck or a rock.
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