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It’s a common question, without a common response: How often should I replace my brake pads? There is no set mileage restriction on when to change your brake pads because brake wear varies depending on several driving factors. For example, drivers who encounter more stop and go traffic will need to replace their brake pads more often than drivers who spend most of their time on the highway.

One method most drivers use to determine when to change their brake pads is sound. If you hear a screeching or metal scraping sound when you brake you need to replace your brake pads immediately. By waiting until you hear this noise when braking can cause damage to your rotors as well as other braking components.

The best way to tell when you should replace your brake pads is to visually inspect your pads. This isn’t difficult to do. First make sure the vehicle is parked in a well lit area where you will be able to kneel beside your tires comfortably. You can view the pads by looking through the outside of the wheel rims, or you may need to remove the wheel to get a better look at the brake pads. Upon inspection, if the pad depth is less than 1/4 inch thick, you are over due to replace the brake pads. If your brake pads are less than 1/8 inch thick they need to be changed immediately for your safety.

No other piece of safety equipment on your vehicle is more important than your brakes. Be sure to inspect and replace your brake pads and braking components on a regular basis to keep your vehicle running safely. If you do not feel comfortable inspecting your brake pads yourself, you can always bring your vehicle into Toyota of Tampa Bay for inspection.

At Toyota of Tampa Bay, we strive to provide our customers with the highest level of customer service. Whether you are looking for a specific vehicle, servicing your ride, or restoring your vehicle to like new conditions after an accident, our sales staff and service technicians continually go the extra mile to make sure you drive away happy.

Here are some of the comments we have received from current customers:

“I was impressed by your personnel during my last transaction on Sunday, March 21^st. Specifically, Dave Farner in your sales department and George Rodriguez in your finance department. I was treated a lot better by Toyota of Tampa Bay than when I bought my Mercedes-Benz ML 350 at Mercedes Benz of Tampa Bay a few days earlier.” – Jorge E. Rodriguez

“I want to thank Mr. Sharpe and Mr. Roache for their consideration in my having my Toyota recall taken care of. I realized it was time consuming with the backlog of inspections and repair but they were more than gracious in ensuring that I was satisfied with their action. I live approximately five miles from Sun Toyota but have always bought my vehicles from Toyota of Tampa Bay (three in the past three years). It is this type of service and attitudes that keeps individuals returning to that dealership. Thanks again!” – Troy Sapp

“I just popped in unexpectedly for an oil change and 10,000 mile checkup on my way back from a long weekend in Georgia. I was in and out in less than an hour with great service from Josue.  Love my Venza!” – Holly Duncan “Thank you so much for going above and beyond in taking care of my car.You kept me informed every step of the way, and had my car back on time as promised!” – Kara Garam

If you would like to share your recent Toyota of Tampa Bay visit, we would love to hear about your experience. Please submit your story here, and your Toyota of Tampa Bay encounter may end up in our future newsletter.

Toyota in recent months has blamed its quality lapses on its rush to top the world  in sales and said it will refocus its goals. But for now, Job one seems to be selling more cars and trucks. The company announced today that it will extend heavy incentives at least through May 3.

The incentives drove a nearly 41% sales rise in March, after recall publicity produced a February slide. So it will continue the lease deals for eight of its best-sellers and continue 0%/60 month financing on six of them.

It also will expand its two-year free maintenance offer.  “We’re extending the two-year complimentary maintenance program, that proved to be very popular with existing Toyota owners in March, to all buyers in April,” says Bob Carter, GM of the Toyota Division for Toyota Motor Sales, USA. “We are pleased by our customers’ continued vote of confidence, and want to thank them for their loyalty by adding value to our products.”

Source: [USA Today]

Toyota promised to respond faster to customer complaints as it held its first meeting of a quality experts committee set up to help salvage a reputation battered by massive recalls and reports of runaway vehicles.

Toyota Motor Corp. appointed chief quality officers in key regions – including North America – where the biggest problems have surfaced to convey customer complaints quickly to its headquarters. It promised to add outside experts, including former U.S. Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater, in evaluating quality measures.

“Listening to consumer voices is most important in regaining credibility from our customers,” said Toyota President Akio Toyoda at a news conference after the quality committee met. “We are setting up a system to respond more quickly to complaints.”

Toyota has recalled more than 8 million vehicles around the world since October for defective gas pedals, faulty floor mats and braking software glitches. Most of them have been in the U.S., where Toyota sales fell 9 percent in February, according to Autodata Corp.

The quality committee meeting brought together 70 executives and autoworkers from Toyota’s global operations at the automaker’s headquarters in central Japan.

Toyota said the company needs to listen more carefully to proposals for better quality, including what drivers are saying.

The company said the quality panel of outside experts will issue its first evaluation report in June, and the quality committee will meet regularly to exchange insights and tackle safety issues.

But Tatsumi Tanaka, a crisis management expert who heads Risk Hedge in Tokyo, said Toyota needed to show that its regional businesses will have the autonomy to act and do more than just communicating complaints to headquarters.

“It’s not enough to say officials got together and met. You need to put people’s worries to rest,” he said.

The quality officers denied anything had been seriously amiss before, or that the new panel signaled radical change.

“I’m actually very excited about the new process. I represent the voice of the customers from North America, and it’s my job to make sure it is fully understood,” said Steve St. Angelo, the North American quality official.

But it was unclear how Toyota can hope to resolve lingering worries that the problem of unintended acceleration in some of its cars may be rooted in an electronic or software defect – an allegation that Toyota has repeatedly denied.

“It is in Toyota’s best interest to find the cause as quickly as they can, using all the help they can get. Trying to save face will ultimately fail,” said Bob Landman of H&L Instruments, an electronics company in North Hampton, New Hampshire, who has been a vocal critic of Toyota’s handling of recalls.

Landman is among the experts who have argued that software glitches and a short circuit caused by the use of lead-free materials in car parts are among the possible explanations for unintended acceleration.

Also Tuesday, Toyota said it will add a brake override – a system that allows the brakes to work if they are pressed together with the accelerator – to new models starting this year. That follows reports in the United States of vehicles speeding up on their own.

Under an effort to beef up quality checks, Toyota said it will set up four additional facilities to train employees in quality controls – in North America, China, Europe and Southeast Asia – modeled after the training center it already has in Japan.

The company said it will expand the use of “black box” data recorders that can help analyze the causes of accidents and speed up communication among quality control teams to make faster decisions on recalls.

Toyota showed reporters its facilities at headquarters, which are designed to check on possible defects in vehicles and parts targeted in consumer complaints.

Among the tests were an X-ray machine that presented three-dimensional computer imagery, an area that simulated heavy rains with water squirting from 400 nozzles, and a room that got both freezing cold and steaming hot to check how vehicles react under extreme weather conditions.

The media tour was intended to illustrate the hard work at the automaker to ensure quality control and respond to driver complaints. Toyoda has acknowledged that the company may have failed to be as quick or responsive as consumers would have liked about defects, especially overseas.

Toyota’s North American sales appear to be recovering this month. Toyota, which generally does not offer big incentives, has begun offering zero-percent financing deals on some models in the U.S. to bring customers back into showrooms.

Toyota’s bottom line is expected to suffer, perhaps by billions of dollars, from a spate of lawsuits being filed by consumers, including some who say they suffered damages from defective Toyota vehicles.

After the crash of a Prius hybrid in New York this month, police said the driver, not the car, was to blame. Officials are investigating another Prius that reportedly accelerated on its own in California.

“To ensure quality, we need to feel we are always at risk,” Shinichi Sasaki, the Toyota executive in charge of quality checks, told reporters. “We should be so worried about our customers we should be having nightmares.”

Source: [Yahoo News]

Planning a productive, fuss-free vegetable garden is a lot easier than you think. In fact, with a little careful planning you can create an easy-care garden that provides you with armloads of delicious homegrown vegetables from spring till fall. To get you started, here are ten tips to keep in mind as you work. A personalized landscape planner can also help you start to get your garden designed. 

• Get maximum yields in a minimum amount of space by interplanting quick-growing vegetables such as bunching onions with slower-growing crops such as broccoli and cauliflower.
• Whenever possible, plant your crops in wide rows or bands instead of single file. Vegetables such as spinach, lettuce, green beans, peas and Swiss chard can all be grown in this manner for bigger harvests.
• Sunshine is essential for healthy vegetables. Locate your garden where it will receive at least six hours of direct sunlight a day. If you have a partially shady location, you’ll probably have more success with leaf crops such as lettuce and spinach than you will with sun worshipers such as tomatoes and melons.
• Healthy soil is the key to a successful vegetable garden. Improve your soil by adding generous amounts of rotted manure, sphagnum peat moss, compost, leaf mold or other organic matter. If your soil is primarily clay, you may want to add some sand to improve drainage. Till or spade all materials into the soil in the early spring or late fall.
• Make gardening a joy, not a chore: Mulch your vegetables in the early summer. A thick mulch helps eliminate weeds, maintains important soil moisture and improves soil structure as it rots. Good mulch materials include shredded bark, compost, cocoa bean hulls, straw and spoiled hay. Note: If you decide to use hay as a mulch, be sure there are no weed or grass seed heads mixed in. These seeds can easily germinate in your garden.
• Grow vertically. Save space and increase yields by growing crops up and over a trellis or arbor. Pole beans, melons, cucumbers and gourds all thrive above ground, leaving more ground space for other crops.
• Get a jump on the growing season by using cloches, row covers and plant protectors to protect crops from early frosts. Even cold-sensitive vegetables such as tomatoes can be transplanted outdoors weeks before normal planting time.
• Save water and minimize watering chores with a drip irrigation system. Drip irrigation provides water directly to where it does the most good: the root zones of your plants. Plus, if you install a timer on your faucet, your garden will get watered automatically, even when you’re on vacation.
• Get twice the harvests from a piece of ground by second-cropping. In our test gardens we always plant quick-growing spring vegetables such as lettuce and spinach together in the same bed. That way, when those crops are harvested, we can replace them with a summer crop of green beans or summer squash.
• Don’t overplant. Choose vegetables that you know you and your family will enjoy. That way you won’t spend time and effort on growing crops you won’t use. Concentrate on your favorites and enjoy yourself.

Source: [iVillage]