$5 Million Lawsuit Alleges Toyota Ignored Transmission Problems for a Decade

In America, if a consumer doesn’t like the product, they have the right to take legal action, and most do. Honda was taken to court on routing problems, ford it’s happening Lawsuit filed due to missing F-150 Lightning featureand GM is therefore forced to seek legal counsel allegedly defective V8 engines. Now, toyota heads to the courtroom for a class-action lawsuit over a defective eight-speed transmission. Car Complaints. Production and supply of transmissions AisinIt is a member of the Toyota Group and is 25% owned by Toyota, according to the lawsuit. This is not quite true because Reuters Last year, Toyota reportedly sold nearly $1 billion in shares, increasing its stake from 24.8% to 20%. Regardless, the lawsuit blames Toyota. So what is the problem and which cars are affected?

Multiple Toyota Models Named in Class Action

In the lawsuit filed by plaintiff Neil Pallaya in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, numerous Toyota and Lexus Models equipped with the eight-speed automatic transmission “slip, hesitate, lose power, make loud whining noises, shift erratically, and fail.” It’s a pretty alarming list, and the lawsuit includes the following models:

The above-mentioned plaintiff purchased a new 2020 Toyota Highlander with a 2GR-FKS 3.5-liter V6 engine and UA80E transmission in December of the same year; the latter is also found in all the cars mentioned above. The car came with a five-year/60,000-mile limited warranty, which would have been just fine, but in September 2025, with roughly 67,200 miles on it, “the eight-speed transmission began making a persistent high-pitched whining noise when the accelerator pedal was depressed.” The lawsuit alleges that a dealer inspection revealed that the transmission was defective and needed to be replaced at an estimated cost of $7,451.33. The customer was on the hook for the bill because the warranty had expired.

Plaintiff Demands $5 Million, Claiming Toyota Knew About the Problems for Years

The lawsuit, which sought “more than $5 million,” reportedly cost Pallaya $405. Its transmission still hasn’t been repaired, and it says the Highlander SUV “is of inferior quality and value to what is offered and fails to meet ordinary consumer expectations for safe and reliable operation.” Moreover, he claims that Toyota and Aisin have known about the problems with this transmission (excessive heat accumulates inside the torque converter, causing the transmission oil to burn and prematurely fail, damaging the clutch) since 2015.

Related: Toyota Filed $5.7 Billion Lawsuit Over Mirai Hydrogen Cars

Pallaya’s class action lawsuit alleges that the two companies were required to order either torque converters or redesigns of the transmissions after Toyota’s warranty analysis group allegedly flagged the transmission as a “high priority powertrain issue” by February 2017. This is said to have led to a number of Technical Service Bulletins (TSBs) addressing issues of “hard gear shifting”, “hesitation”, “abnormal transmission noise” and “improper torque converter operation”. The lawsuit also highlights the transmission control module software and claims the transmission should last at least 200,000 miles. A number of relevant TSBs are listed below:

• T-TT-0580-19 (November 4, 2019) and T-TT-0580-19_Rev (January 27, 2020)

This story was first published by . automatic blog First appeared on December 1, 2025 News section. Add Autoblog as follows: Preferred Source by clicking here.