If anyone wants to nerd out on this (I found it interesting,) you can read the official NHTSA report here:
Overall link to additional documents:
www.nhtsa.gov
I'm not an expert but interesting points that stand out to me:
1. This is specifically labeled a "Safety Recall." It seems like the NHTSA only deals in defects that could injure or damage people/cars and impact highway safety. Other "recalls" specific to Tundras like broken seat trim, poor alignment/tire wear or wind noise aren't on there. Probably just TSBs?
So when you look at it that way, check out section 2. (2) - "If engine failure occurs on a Hybrid vehicle, the vehicle continues to have some motive power for limited distances and the driver receives a continuous audible warning, warning lamps, and visual warning messages."
In terms of safety they're not exactly claiming that hybrids are good to go, they're saying that if your engine dies at 70 you have a better chance of coasting to the side of the road vs a non-hybrid. Reading between the lines, they're saying hybrids can also fail.
2. In section 6 you can read a chronology of events. Here's a summary but there's a decent amount of info there:
- March 22 - Dec 22: Three engines failed. Toyota looked into it. Couldn't figure out what happened. They hypothesized that it was machining debris so they implemented cleanliness changes.
- Jan 23 - Aug 23: Toyota continued to watch the market and analyze engines to see how their cleanliness changes were doing.
- Sep 23 - Jan 24: Toyota saw an increase in engine failures (We can assume that a large portion of the 824 verified failures happened here between 2023-2024.) They also started investigations into the design of the engine (including the durability of the crank bearing itself) and the installation process in the factory.
- Feb 24 - May 24: Investigations showed that even some good engines showed bearing degradation but no failure. They completed their investigation and "The results showed that the damage that was seen on the bearings was from debris created during the engine machining process, and that there were sufficient debris sizes and amounts present to cause a bearing to fail."
Then they announced the official recall last month.
3. In this document, Toyota states that "All known owners of the subject vehicles will be informed that remedy is under investigation and that they will be contacted when further information is available" and in the official notice to dealers, they say "Toyota is currently developing the remedy for this issue."
The timeline makes sense to me, with Hybrids of all years and 24s, both Tundras and Seqouias, that have failed. They implemented changes in Dec 2022, but haven't made any changes since then - at least none that I could see in this report. They made those first changes and then just kept analyzing and studying the problem. And as noted, they don't have the remedy yet. So it may be a little while before they have the bugs worked out of their machining debris issue.
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