Hi to anyone in the forum. Finally on Thursday April 10, 2014 I decided to get the car from the
service in Athens and drove it back to my city Patras 300 km. After those initial 20 seconds of vibration and metallic sound the car worked fine with very good performance, as always, no sighs of overheating.
Since that day I have used the car regularly,as normal. I have done over 1500 km driving it in the city but also upsloping to mountains , one hour of vigorous driving up to 1300 meters high mountain. There is no coolant shortage, (it is on the max indication fixed over this period) no overheating, no oil shortage or change of color. The only problem, the same familiar sound and vibration only on start up for 20 sec, not all the times. I have noticed that if after turning the ignition switch on to “ready”, you put the gear box to ( R) and with your left foot on the brake , you start the combustion engine by pressing the accelerator pedal there is no vibration heard but only a slight metallic sound.(listen to the attached sound file)Voice00006.mp3Voice00009.mp3 If you wait for 30 seconds then you are free to go !.
During this initial period if you put the gear box from the ( R ) position to ( P ) or to ( D ) things are very bad with the car to vibrate and the metallic sound to be loud - very-very bad, like something is loose in the gear box and trying to find its place to fit!. An other hint !. If you are stopped in the city with batteries level of energy at the lower lever where the combustion engine automatically starts , the same vibration (no metallic sound) is evident and once I had to put the gear box from ( P ) to ( R ) for 20 secs , with the brake pedal pressed in order the system to work smoothly. Also yesterday I met a guy who replaced the hybrid to the same dealer for the recall and after some time the car had the same behaviour. The same ,one and only authorized service in Greece , informed him that there is a crack on the engine !!.Of course after this crack his has done 40000 km without any problem. I think that something is really wrong with those cracks!!!. Any solution to avoid the one and only service dealer issue and fix our cars? Thanks