Toyota upgrades DPF warranty

Toyota Australia has extended the warranty on some versions of the troublesome diesel particulate filter (DPF) of its 1GD and 2GD engines from three to 10 years.

The warranty extension was communicated to customers in late August and applies to Toyota HiLux and Fortuner models built between January 9, 2015 and May 31, 2018, as well as LandCruiser Prados built between June 5, 2015 and June 1, 2018.

The extension does not include vehicles built beyond those dates with a manual DPF regeneration switch, which are covered by either the standard three- or five-year warranty depending on when they were purchased.

Toyota is currently defending a class action lawsuit over the DPF fitted to both the 1GD-FTV 2.8-litre four-cylinder turbo-diesel engine and the 2GD-FTV 2.4-litre.

These DPFs have not always regenerated automatically and have also been prone to blowing unburnt fuel in the form of white smoke and emitting a noxious odour during regeneration.

The Toyota DPF class action has been filed by Bannister Law and Gilbert + Tobin, on behalf of HiLux, Fortuner and Prado owners. They accuse Toyota of misleading, deceptive and unconscionable conduct.

The vehicles covered in the class action were built between October 2015 and April 2020.

Last Friday, an interlocutory hearing in the federal court in Sydney ruled admissible an expert’s report that savaged the design of the Toyota DPF, both in its original form and after the manual switch was introduced.

A complete redesign of the DPF was fitted to all three models in 2020, including the updated top-selling Toyota HiLux ute.

Toyota referred to the 10-year warranty offering in its response provided to media after Friday’s hearing. It confirmed it had written to affected owners in August telling them of the upgrade.

There is also a section on the Toyota public website that outlines the warranty upgrade and a ‘customer service exercise’ (CSE) taken by Toyota in relation to the DPF.

The CSE is offering to upgrade engine control unit software and install the latest DPF hardware to vehicles without manual DPF switches free of charge. What exactly that means, we’ve gone back to Toyota to establish. It’s yet to respond.

Toyota says the 10-year/unlimited-kilometre warranty “applies to customers who may have experienced an issue with the DPF system which may present as substantial white smoke discharged during the regeneration process or the Malfunction Indicator Lamp (MIL) may illuminate and in some cases, as a precautionary measure, engine power may be reduced (‘limp home’ mode)”.

Vehicles with the manual regen switch purchased in the second half of 2019 get the three-year warranty, while from 2019 onwards all Toyotas migrated to a five-year warranty combined with unlimited kilometres for private buyers and 160,000km for commercial purposes.

Toyota makes it clear the 10-year warranty does not abrogate in any way fundamental rights guaranteed under Australian Consumer Law.

This is not the only issue with Toyota’s diesel four-cylinder GD engine design, which has also been modified to cope with an issue where dust particles leak into the engine past the air filter, known as dusting .