NHTSA Complaint #11512608 — 2012 TOYOTA CAMRY

As a background, we bought the car in 2012 brand new. My background is Mechanical engineering, and hence maintained the car very well. Apart from this issue on Torque convertor rest is all good. The car has about 94,000 miles on it. Around few weeks back, the car started to hesitate when it is shifting between 20-25 mph. Sometimes this can be dangerous as you are expecting the car to pick up the speed esp. when joining the freeway etc. and always worried about being rammed in the rear by the traffic. Anyway, I took it to the dealer who said there was a “Warranty Enhancement” program that expired after 10 years. I am not sure why Toyota is permitted to have this Warranty Enhancement program when they full well know this should be a recall. This is widely discussed on all the Toyota forums. The repair is expensive about $2200 (the work is detailed in the Warranty Enhancement program ZE5) and requires software update to be done which the dealers control. With the cost of new cars and also lack of supply I had no good choice but to pay for this repair. I tried to get Toyota Headquarters to see if they honor the “Warranty Enhancement”, but they refused to even though some of this period coincides with pandemic. We have bought several of the Toyota products including Camry, Sienna & Tacoma and never been more disappointed in them than this handling of the issue. I am still at a loss on why NHTSA would let Toyota do this warranty enhancement, and not a full recall. This is putting lives of drivers at risk where one day where it might either lock up or hesitate to pick up full speed when needed. More importantly, the warranty enhancement clearly states that it will only be fixed during that period if the transmission shudder shows. It is bound to show some time, so if they know this is a mechanical and software issue why not do a recall to fix this instead of putting people’s lives in danger? NHTSA please help investigate this safety issue. UPDATE 06/16/2023: This is a brand new design introduced by To