Clutch Slipping Issues and Warranty Denial

[BananaBoi]

I wanted to compile my whole experience of the clutch issue and warranty process into one place. Was supposed to enjoy this car as a long term daily driver but I have recently been considering selling it to get an Integra Type S which I had considered prior to purchase.

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At about 11k miles, I noticed my clutch had started slipping. Was going to pass someone on the highway and my RPM started floating around 5-6k in 6th gear despite going like 75mph.

I know user error couldn't have cause this as I've only ever owned manual cars and I don't drive the car hard either since its my daily. The car is stock except for an intake and is built in September 2023.

In early May, I talked to Capitol Toyota in San Jose and they wanted to charge $300 to diagnose, determine cause, and see if it'll be covered under warranty.

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After poor communication issues from the dealer, the person in charge of my car going on vacation without passing it off to another person, and keeping my car for a total of 2 weeks, Toyota said clutch is burned and it will not be covered under warranty. They quoted me $8500 repair.

The dealer took the diagnosis fee, and said I can either apply it towards the repair, or pay it and take the car. After opening a case with Toyota, they essentially said that they cant do anything about it.

Never had this poor an experience with a dealership from Honda or BMW in the past.

The mechanic my family has been using for 20 years offered to do the repair for ~$800 labour.

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I ended up ordering and installing the ClutchMasters FX400SS 8-puck and a steel flywheel with an E90 slave cylinder.

Good news: the car drives and the clutch doesn't slip

Bad news:
1) when the car sits outside in the heat, the car will not detect the clutch pedal is depressed and therefore won't start
2) likely related, this also leads to the revmatch feature not working when shifting
3) the pedal is very heavy now and not as pleasant for daily driving

I can get the car started sometimes if I continuously pump the clutch for a few minutes. There is no issue starting when it is parked in the garage or if I start it in the morning before it gets hot outside.

I took it to a different Toyota dealer to diagnose the issue and dropped it off. Three days later, they call and say they need a $300 diagnosis fee solely because I have a Banks digital gauge plugged into the OBDII port and wont diagnose until I authorize the fee. I am going tomorrow to pick it up.

Our mechanic is going to take a look at it soon and see what the issue is. I will have an update with that soon.

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My commentary:

Toyota claims that this is a wear item and therefore not covered under warranty. They are correct. But wear items have an expected life. In my experience, I have gotten 100k-150k miles out of a clutch before considering replacement. Assuming I am abusing the car, I get half the life at 50k miles. Even a quarter of the life at 25k miles. The dealer asked if I was on my second set of tires and were surprised when I said I was on the original set. For a daily driver, the clutch shouldn't go out at 11k miles unless its a factory defect.

The dealership experience has been absolutely atrocious and its made me decide to never buy a Toyota product again. Even the initial purchase from a dealer outside my area was difficult with poor communication from the dealer's side.

All this to say, I am annoyed it happened and it's been a frustrating and expensive pain in the ass to deal with. I just want to drive the car but its essentially been out of commission for 2 of the 10 months I've had it. At this point I'm going to pay whatever I need to get it fixed and drive this thing into the ground.

Thanks for listening to me rant lmao

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Here are pictures from the OEM parts for those curious.

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[UYCR]

Have you tried bleeding the clutch again to see if that helps with your current issue at start up? I also wonder if the clutch is too heavy for the rev matching to work.

 

[tharris4995]

Dealerships are so shitty.. sad. Even a dual disk full race clutch and upgraded flywheel doesn’t cost 4k total for install. Where do they get 8k from???

 

[Vertex]

I will say, as I have worked in the service department since 2017 at a couple different dealerships; it does not matter in my experience what type of or brand vehicle you get. A clutch will almost NEVER be covered as it is considered a wear item unless there is something to prove, beyond a doubt, that it was not operator error and something did indeed fail to cause the clutch to fail.

I'm not saying you caused this by any means, it's just how it works with warranty and warranty repairs in general. It does sound like you tried what I would have suggested as far as contacting corporate. I just am beyond surprised at how much the dealer quoted you unless the clutch in these take that much longer to swap out that the ones I'm more used to seeing.

Sorry about the bad luck and I'll keep and eye on the thread and try asking a couple techs what they think could be the problem.

 

[NCMIKE]

If you are paying out of your pocket, I would talk to a transmission specialist shop about your issues. How many manual transmissions does a Toyota dealer even service over a years period?

 

[Vertex]

It sounds like a mechanical issue or issue with possibly the clutch pedal itself. Sounds like the car is not recognizing your input on the clutch pedal which would explain both the no start and rev match issue, however, find it odd that it only happens when it's warmer out.

 

[SunshineSupraMan]

There are switches that detect when the brake pedal, or the clutch, is depressed.

In my car, the brake pedal switch failed, and the car would start whether or not you had your foot on The brake pedal.

This caused of a variety of other issues, as you might imagine. For example, the cruise control would not come on, And I would get brake system failure messages.

I wonder if the switch on your clutch pedal is failing, broken, misalign, worn out, or otherwise not working properly. This might explain why it seems like it the problem is worse and when it is hot, And why repeatedly pumping the clutch fixes the problem sometimes.

 

[exe36m3]

Have you tried bleeding the clutch again to see if that helps with your current issue at start up? I also wonder if the clutch is too heavy for the rev matching to work.

Actually, I was thinking the same thing. The rev matching is designed for the stock clutch.

The 8 puck you are saying is really hard to push in is *actually* how high performance clutches are on German cars. They are *super* heavy.

 

[exe36m3]

There are switches that detect when the brake pedal, or the clutch, is depressed.

In my car, the brake pedal switch failed, and the car would start whether or not you had your foot on The brake pedal.

This caused of a variety of other issues, as you might imagine. For example, the cruise control would not come on, And I would get brake system failure messages.

I wonder if the switch on your clutch pedal is failing, broken, misalign, worn out, or otherwise not working properly. This might explain why it seems like it the problem is worse and when it is hot, And why repeatedly pumping the clutch fixes the problem sometimes.

I agree, if I recall right, BMW puts a switch on the top of the clutch. It's easy to spot. Those used to die after a while and the car would not start. Switches usually are pretty cheap, $30-$45 last time I bought one for my E36 M3. If it's cheap enough for the Supra, easy to replace and try.

 

[Tacoma714]

Actually, I was thinking the same thing. The rev matching is designed for the stock clutch.

The 8 puck you are saying is really hard to push in is *actually* how high performance clutches are on German cars. They are *super* heavy.

So you are saying rev matching wouldn’t work regardless if it was a Clutchmaster’s or Uni Clutch installed? Asking because I am an idiot. How does the vehicle know you have an aftermarket clutch and to not do the rev matching?

 

[UYCR]

So you are saying rev matching wouldn’t work regardless if it was a Clutchmaster’s or Uni Clutch installed? Asking because I am an idiot. How does the vehicle know you have an aftermarket clutch and to not do the rev matching?

I just mentioned it in case these cars have a sensor somewhere in the system that might be detecting unusual pressure and disengaging the feature. If the sensor that detects the pressing of the clutch is bad that could also be the reason and makes more sense too but I don't know much about BMW powertrains.

 

[exe36m3]

So you are saying rev matching wouldn’t work regardless if it was a Clutchmaster’s or Uni Clutch installed? Asking because I am an idiot. How does the vehicle know you have an aftermarket clutch and to not do the rev matching?

Well don't call yourself an idiot! We are all learning.
But I was thinking more about this. If your clutch switch is dead/dying, that could explain your rev matching issue because the cars ECU doesn't know if you engaged your clutch. If so, another case for replacing that clutch switch.

Rev matching essentially just blips your throttle for you.
If I was designing a simple line of code to check for clutch engagement, it would be using that clutch switch signal.

So I am changing my "vote" to clutch switch, NOT the clutch disc. Although the harder to push in is the nature of the new clutch disk. On the bright side, you'll have a stronger left leg!

 

[BananaBoi]

I'm not saying you caused this by any means, it's just how it works with warranty and warranty repairs in general. It does sound like you tried what I would have suggested as far as contacting corporate. I just am beyond surprised at how much the dealer quoted you unless the clutch in these take that much longer to swap out that the ones I'm more used to seeing.

We did take it to toyota corporate and they said the same thing. No help, pay the dealer to fix it, glhf.

There are switches that detect when the brake pedal, or the clutch, is depressed.

In my car, the brake pedal switch failed, and the car would start whether or not you had your foot on The brake pedal.

This caused of a variety of other issues, as you might imagine. For example, the cruise control would not come on, And I would get brake system failure messages.

I wonder if the switch on your clutch pedal is failing, broken, misalign, worn out, or otherwise not working properly. This might explain why it seems like it the problem is worse and when it is hot, And why repeatedly pumping the clutch fixes the problem sometimes.

I'll bring up to bleed the clutch when I drop it off to my mechanic. But I'll probably order the part to have the switch replaced as well. Just need to find a part number for it.

 

[mdpalmer]

Bummer you had a poor experience with servicing the car. Typical dealer BS.

Couple questions and comments:

1) Can you share the breakdown for the dealer quote for repairs? Screenshot of the estimate or a breakdown of parts and labor, what parts (and part numbers), cost, hours, etc. Even with inflated labor costs and new oem parts, even half of the $8k they quoted seems a stretch.

2) Any indication that the dual mass flywheel itself may have been a contributing factor to the clutch system failure? As in there is some slop?

3) Any indication that the hydraulics were a contributing factor? Obvious things like leaks in the lines, master or slave cylinders, for example.

4) The friction disk doesnt have uniform wear around the edges, it looks like some parts of it are ground down more than others. Almost looks like there was not even pressure applied to the disk when engaged. Did the service people notice that and provide an explanation? That doesn't seem like a reasonable wear pattern, even if you did beat on it.

5) As for the heavy pedal with the aftermarket clutch components, I'd imagine the oem hydraulics are not designed to handle the additional demand, I would hope whoever sold you the clutch would have some ideas, did they offer or recommend anything (slave upgrade, etc)?

6) It's still not clear to me if the primary issue is the clutch components themselves, driver behavior, installation, or some kind of system incompatibility, quality control, parts out of spec/tolerance, fundamental design issue, etc or some combination of the above. I have 4,500 miles on my car stock engine, and I drive it pretty hard, mostly in traffic, no issues yet knock on wood. Everyone seems to find a different limit, it would be nice to show some kind of trend so Toyota would do something.

Thanks for posting pictures that is very helpful. When mine comes out I'll make sure to share.

Hope everything works out for you, yellow Supras are really awesome!

 

[BananaBoi]

Bummer you had a poor experience with servicing the car. Typical dealer BS.

Couple questions and comments:

1) Image at the end of this post. They told me 8500 over the phone so I went in today to get the quote on paper. Parts are 4966 and the service guy said they charge 10 hours labour which is 2800 =$7766 which is less the phone quite but still too much. My mechanic did it for 800 labour since we pay him cash and had it to me in a day.

2-4) They gave no explanation on why it would have failed. I do agree with you on the wear pattern on it. Its likely not the hydraulics as I have been under the car a few times before taking it in to them and never saw any red flags but wasn't overtly looking for anything like that. I'm only mild/moderately mechanically inclined so I wont know enough to tell.

5) I changed the slave to an E90 slave without the CDV. Car is off at my mechanic's place right now. He's replacing the clutch switch and bleeding the hydraulics. I expect to get it back around Wednesday next week so I'll give an update soon. The clutch kit I ordered is designed to be a minor step up from OEM designed to be easily streetable but can handle a little more performance.

6) I couldn't diagnose the issue either. I daily drive mine and have only really driven it hard once or twice since I've owned it. I had heard toyota is particularly shit at warranty claims but never thought I'd have to actually deal with it. I just want to drive the car already

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