The Toyota GR Corolla is a phenomenal car that packs a wallop for the price. The 300-horsepower, all-wheel drive hatch is a truly special car that customers are taking pride in owning. That's why it must be disheartening when videos appear to show Toyota service technicians mistreating the automaker's hottest hatchback ever.
A video posted to YouTube earlier this week appears to show one Toyota service technician teaching another how to drive a manual transmission with a customer's car. The video opens with the owner requesting that only a responsible technician drive his Corolla, and he even tells the service advisor that he has a camera recording inside.
This information wasn't relayed to the employees, who then openly discussed the possibility of the customer recording them. The video doesn't name the dealership, but the description says that the dealer's general manager contacted the GR Corolla owner and helped resolve the issue.
The second video is only a day old, and it allegedly shows an inexperienced technician attempting to drive a customer's car without knowing how to operate a manual transmission, stalling it more than once. Another tech then drives it, missing a warning in the instrument cluster that read: "Avoid Excessive Acceleration Due to Temperature." The video ends with the driver excessively revving the engine.
Motor1 has reached out to Toyota and the dealership in the second video for comment.
The ever-growing surveillance state continues to reveal that privacy is more of an illusion than a principled idea. Anyone for a few bucks can put a camera just about anywhere, and many have been putting them in their cars. This has captured some wild on-road moments, but it has also revealed that those we entrust to fix and service our vehicles can also take advantage of them. These two new videos exemplify why some owners will bite the bullet and do all the maintenance themselves.
