NHTSA Complaint #11625147 — 2018 TOYOTA CAMRY

Check engine light came on one day. Ignored it. The next morning was driving on the highway and noticed the car had some trouble accelerating, tried to switch lanes at ~40-60mph (don’t remember) and the car started to kick back and almost felt like it was coming to a complete stop. I was so scared the car would just stop in the middle of the highway because i couldn’t even change lanes without it kicking back/not accelerating enough. There was not a lot of traffic around so i was lucky enough to get the car into the far right lane and coast. An alert came on, almost immediately after, on the dash and was told to pull over due to the engine overheating. Looked at the heat gauge and noticed it was all the way to HOT. Got off the highway and tried to take local roads back home, the car started to kick back almost like it was about to come to a complete stop but was able to keep going local roads, didn’t pull over (was close enough to home that I didn’t want to leave my car on the side of the road if it didn’t start back up again) and the engine eventually cooled down. Got back home to put in more coolant (there was ZERO coolant, never noticed a leak) Car ran fine for about a week, then check engine light came back on. Took it to autozone for a scan, code came out as P26CB. Took it to Toyota for diagnostic and repair, the code they found was P26CB71. Was told by the service advisor that the car should’ve turned off automatically and I shouldn’t have been able to drive it so far with the engine over heating like that. Also was told that the engine was very close to “blowing up”.