u/DJ_Apex

original thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/Toyota_bZ/comments/1vigg2i/update_bz_woodland_parasitic_drain/

I’ll start replying to emails and eventually post a tutorial here, but it’s been an eventful day and I have lots of other shit going on. But…

I was packing up for a solo hike with my dogs and went to open the door. Not surprised to find the door locked. I manually turned the key, got in, and got a contporaneous video of myself holding the key and pressing the power button. Nothing. I made a mistake here and didn’t take a battery reading immediately. I freaked out and called roadside for a tow and left a message at the dealer saying what happened and I was looking for a loaner. Dealer wasn’t open so I had some time to settle and figure out what to do. More details later but I’m sending a formal request for replacement to Toyota and contacted a lemon law lawyer. WA state has good laws and you can get consultation and potentially representation free. Excellent.

Now I’m filing away by date and subject all of the photos, videos, and documentation to pull together a binder for the lawyers. I’ll also be calling first thing tomorrow the Brand Engagement Services.

We’ll see how this goes. I know Toyota has deep pockets and I’ve put a lot of research into this. It’s the worst case I’ve heard of in my somewhat limited research and the fact that it died just before I went into the wilderness is a bit chilling as a narrative. I appreciate the folks who have helped onboard me and welcome me to this community of folks with this sick ass car that sometimes is shit.

EDIT: That was a joke about getting rich, but I do think we need to work together to make a case. Nobody is going to get compensated much, but it would be nice as a 2022 or newer bZ to get a few bucks from a class action.

UPDATE: They gave me a loaner and acknowledged that Toyota is aware of a problem specific to the bZ. So now the questions are: how long have they known about this? and Are they going to claim that this problem is specific to the Woodland, as it seems they are now? The key is linking what appears to be a slightly worse problem on the Woodland, bad enough to render it inoperable. But it's only barely past the threshold of the others burning through batteries. If enough people post similar symptoms, there's a case for a systemic problem in the architecture of the software. That's a lot bigger than just a battery failure in one specific trim level. But a total recall of the bZ from the past 5 years would be devastating, so they're absolutely going to cover this up.

Original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Toyota_bZ/comments/1uwvbrc/bz_woodland_problems_out_the_gate/

So we've now had the car in the shop twice for a dead battery and both times it wasn't sitting for more than a few hours. They've gone from there's no problem, to there is a problem but it's been fixed (they reset everything and it stopped doing the drain thing in the shop, but never found a root cause). I thought I was finally making progress and got the Sales Manager to admit that he wouldn't trust the car in its current state to go into the wilderness, which it was advertised to do. It took some frustrated escalation, but he agreed that what we bought didn't match what we were sold, so we need to either replace the car or figure out how to fix the real difference between the two. Replacing the car was out of the question so I figured we would just account for the real damages so far and in the future. I sent a spreadsheet with tabs for the situation so far: my time researching, money spent on a charger, the inconvenience of the car dying, having to bring the car in and have a loaner, and potential trips we had planned, etc; and some compensation for the car being potentially ready to die at any moment moving forward, plus a clause that a third time means we get a replacement. Then they said they were going to regional with that. At this point I realized I was having to manage the situation so I gave a deadline for a response along with action steps.

They then sent an email at 5pm on the deadline I set saying that after meeting with regional, the best step forward is Toyota Brand Engagement. They gave me the customer service number and a said have a good day. No direct line, no case number, they didn't indicate that they had passed information along. So I called the number and they had my car pulled up, but nothing in their system. Apparently the TAS system doesn't talk to whatever their system is. So I started a case and got a number, then sent a long email to the dealership about how insulting it is to not put any effort into the handoff and just disappearing. I requested a direct line to a manager who had been fully briefed and had their information sent over, and I asked if this meant that they were not offering any compensation at the dealer level. I also asked for the meeting notes or minutes to determine how they decided on this particular course of action.

I got an email back from the GM saying he's sorry for the poor customer service and that he's sent all the files to TBE and gave info on lemon laws and said have a nice day. I wrote back saying how frustrating it is to write a letter explaining how I am starting to lose trust in the dealership's listening abilities and frustrated with the lack of direction, only to get a response that doesn't address my questions fully and gives no directive or expectation of a next step.

I'm very frustrated right now and I'm kind of gently stroking the pin on the metaphorical grenade. I'm actually shocked at how poor their communication has been. I'm waiting until this is fully settled to really make a splash about it, but so far they have been gaslighting, uninformed, dismissive, disengaged, and generally just pointing me into corners repeatedly.

So I'm not putting them on blast just yet, but they're definitely on notice. What's wild to me is that they don't seem to notice that I'm potentially an extremely disgruntled customer, and instead of actually listening and trying to do some basic problem solving, they immediately started trying to brush us off and shoo us away. Do they not expect me to dig in my heels here?

PS I'm not going to publicly post the name of the dealership, but DM me and I can tell you. It's in Washington State is what I'll say.

Hi all, this is my first time posting in this subreddit and I’m jumping in hot with a problem. I just bought a brand new 2026 bZ Woodland. We were super excited and it’s fast as shit, great sound system, BUT… After about 3 weeks and one long trip, it started giving a battery low indicator on the dash. After a few days of that, it completely died and wouldn’t start. We had to jump the 12V battery to start it, but then it ran fine. Then my wife had it not start in the morning and jumped it, then went to work and it was dead by lunch time. We brought it into the shop and they went from nothing’s wrong to "it’s a short in the battery" to "it’s something with the telecommunications system." The latest explanation is that the engineers are saying that a third-party API in the app is pinging location data for charging stations while the car is off.

The car has now been in the shop for nearly 3 weeks and we’ve been given a loaner vehicle. Our last communication was Saturday when they said they had it running and still had some tests and would get back. We haven't heard back and it's now Tuesday night. I'll end there in how much I disclose until I speak with a lawyer. 

Now, there is quite a bit to unpack here. First, we are in limbo car-wise. We have a loaner, but it's our only real car (we have an old Leaf for around town) and we can't take it to Canada, which is an issue because my wife is Canadian and we live 30 miles from the border. At 30 days, it becomes a clear lemon law case but as is it's pretty arguable that it applies now (reasonable attempts have been made to fix and failed). That's not why I'm here though.

I'm also not here to complain about the customer service I got which ranged from pretty cool and understanding to kind of sarcastic when we kept insisting something was still wrong. (OK I kind of am)

Why I am here is this: I see one other post with a similar problem and the dealer has told us that others are having the same issue and they have techs working on it. But this is bad. It's not a battery problem, it's not a software problem, but it's a software and hardware environment problem. If a third party app can access the car when it's off and do things that render it inoperable in a matter of hours to days, the natural consequences of that are tremendous.

So I'm curious if others having this problem could share their experience and we can try to figure out what the fuck is actually going on here. This is at best incredibly sloppy coding and security. At worst, well, get as conspiratorial as you like. Anyways, I'm writing to try to connect with others and also start a trail and see if we can get concrete information early. Thanks all and reply or DM with questions or similar experiences. Thanks!