Bought my first rav last year.Everbody in the street admired it and said what a lovely car it was.It is an 02 vx with a lovely set of wolfrace alloys, rav front bumper,runner boards,black rear wheel cover,full leather inside all in black.One young guy said it looked like a gangsters car.A really nice
car to drive,smooth and very comfortable.Then in the summer we started to notice a problem with the automatic gearbox.It wasn't smooth.It would lock up when changing up from 2nd / 3rd.It wouldn't pull away in a low gear, making pulling out of junctions very,very tricky and also scary.It just wasn't a nice motor to drive.We did some detective work ,and my partner did the most,mainly on the internet to discover that the 02 rav can suffer a problem with the ecm unit that controls the automatic gearbox.According to certain postings ,Toyota knew about this problem,and informed there dealers to keep it quiet.We put the car into a garage that came recommended and at great expense i am glad to say the car is now perfect.What is annoying me about the whole thing is having to pay out all that money to fix a problem that Toyota knew about but didn't recall the motors to change the ecm unit.Maybe i should write to Toyota direct and tell them that you should not have to replace the ecm when your car has 66,000 mls on the clock and why didn't they recall all the rav's and change them under warrenty.