Engine Fires And Toyota Engine Sludge - Corolland: the Toyota Corolla Forums

Guest autoresearcher

There are more and more reports about engine fires in the sludge-affected vehicles. What is causing these fires? We know that the sludge-affected vehicles are prone to excessively high engine temperatures. The oil is essentially baking inside the engine. Some engines have shown excessive fuel in the engine oil, too. Care to comment?

Autoresearcher

Below is a recent Toyota Sienna owner account of an engine fire. What could have happened if the nieghbor did not notify the driver of this vehicle? I know of one case where a woman was burned severely when this occurred in her Sienna. Her dog was burned to death in the fire. The NHTSA opened an investigation into the 2000 Sienna when there were other reports of fires, however it closed this same investigation in short order. Why?

"I bouht a used 2000 Sienna. It been smoking heavily during startup and I had it repaired at an independent mechanic last February since Toyota will not shoulder the repairs because the mileage is over 75,000 and they said there's no gel present. After the machine got rebuilt, the minivan is running great. I had an oil change at a Toyota Dealer last June and even drove 1000+ miles to and from Canada. Last month, I went to another Toyota dealer to have the 82,500 maintenance done. Last weekend, when my wife was driving out of a neighbor's driveway, she was flagged down by my neighbor and was told that droplet of fire are dripping under the engine. My wife got out and saw it and she immediately took out our son from the van. She asked some neighbors for help to stop the fire but to no avail. The fire started to emit a very black smoke in a matter of minutes so she called up 911 for assistance. Volunteer firefighters was able to stop the fire and luckily nobody got hurt. But the problem is that the engine area is heavily burned and I think it would be declared a total wreck.

Has anybody experienced the same thing about their Sienna? I'm trying to look at the NHTSA website if there are any information with engine fires with Siennas. Please let me know if anybody has information about this issue."

I have not heard of such thing in a Corolla.

Also this forum is for Corolla owners only.

You may want to be on www.toyotanation.com......

Hundreds of thousands of cars are produced by Toyota. When "one" person experiences such tragedy, the rage has got to be tremendous and ofcourse this person would want to air his opinion as best as possible.. i.e.. internet..

When such info found on the internet, it sounds like Siennas are bad..

Few HAPPY people will make a special case of internet posting about their cars.

Those are my comments.

Sounds like goofed work by the dealership to me.

I've driven some really rough cars - but have never caught any one fire for any reason - even one that had a leaky carb gasket and bad valve cover gaskets, dripping fuel and oil everywhere.

This post reminds me of the Honda CRV issue relatively recently. Remember the news about Honda CRVs catching on fire from oil dripped onto exhaust manifolds? Some houses and garages were completely burned down - the info in the post about the Sienna sounds exactly like the one of the reports on the Honda. They wanted recalls and class action suit against Honda for design defects - ended up being goofed work by mechanics that accidentally drip oil onto the manifold while doing an oil change.

I totally agree with RAV4ER - people rarely post happy instances with their cars - only bad ones.

thats horrible to read that someone's dog was burned to death, we drive our mastiff in our van and I'd hate that to happen to him. whatever the cause I hope there's a solve so it doesnt continue to happen. Im glad I drive a odyssey and not a sienna. there's nothing wrong with posting about that here, alot of us here also drive vans so who knows...several people could be driving sienna's also and may benefit from seeing this. I would try toyota nation too though, they probably have a sienna forum.