Bob Kuzniewski was hurt pretty bad after getting re-ended last year.
“After my car accident, I wanted to buy the safest car possible.”
So on his new Toyota Avalon, the now disabled Air Force veteran got all the latest safety features, including a pre-collision avoidance system.
With it, the brakes are supposed to engage automatically to avoid impact.
But the car maker recalled the system in November because it was going off when it shouldn’t.
It effected more than 30,000 cars:
Model Year 2013-2015 Avalon, Avalon Hybrid, Lexus ES350 and ES300h sedans.
“I had one incident where it interpreted a manhole cover as a threat. People were getting rear ended,” said Kuniewski.
He said Toyota gave him the runaround and instead of a fix, they just turned the system off.
“They disabled the collision avoidance system and they put this sticker on and they told me do not remove that sticker,” he said.
Bob and his wife paid $1900 for a safety feature that was no longer working, so they went after Toyota and Thursday won a Lemon law hearing against them.
Bob said Toyota’s attorney was not happy.
“He said this is going to open the door for more lemon law cases when people aren’t happy with the condition of recalls. One of the board members said Toyota better get busy repairing these recalls,” he said.
Winning the lemon law hearing means the Kuzneiswki’s will be able give the Avalon back.
They plan on using the refund to buy another car. But it won’t be a Toyota.
“They could have settled out of court, they didn’t have to go and threaten up with attorney’s and threaten us with engineers,” he said.
We reached out to Toyota. They declined to comment at this time.
If you have a Lemon law case, file a complaint on the State Attorney General’s website.
