1998 TOYOTA COROLLA — Complaint #1774295
Open-data reference.
NHTSA Complaint about EQUIPMENT:ELECTRICAL:DONGLE filed October 19, 2021
NHTSA complaint #1774295 (ODI reference 11437379) concerns a 1998 TOYOTA COROLLA and was filed on October 19, 2021. The owner reports the failure occurred on September 19, 2021. The report was geocoded to Washington based on the filer's self-reported location. The affected component is categorized as equipment:electrical:dongle, one of NHTSA's standardized taxonomy codes used to group defect patterns across make, model, and year.
The filer flagged the following severity indicators: crash: no, fire: no, injuries: 0, fatalities: 0. No crash, fire, or fatality was associated with this report, which places it in the early-warning stream rather than the priority-review stream. Because a VIN was supplied, this complaint is tied to a specific vehicle and not just a model-year cohort.
Individual complaints are consumer-submitted and unverified by NHTSA engineers — the agency's role at this stage is to collect, index, and make them searchable. What matters for federal action is the pattern: when many owners of the same TOYOTA COROLLA cohort independently describe similar equipment:electrical:dongle failures, defect investigators have grounds to open a PE and request manufacturer data. Related filings for the same vehicle and component appear below, and the detail page for the full 1998 TOYOTA COROLLA shows the complete component-level complaint distribution alongside any active investigations or recalls.
Complaint Description
My auto mechanic and I, after extensive diagnosis, have confirmed that the Pulse mileage/route tracking device that Metromile car insurance had me plug into the computer port of my 1998 Toyota Corolla LE is failing or has failed, and this caused a potentially disastrous situation to develop w/my car engine. When starting the engine from cold, it would cause repeated misfires, causing the rpms to drop quickly, then surge up, before settling into the proper cold idle speed. This would repeat itself every few seconds until the engine warmed up completely (usually about 10 minutes). When in gear, the car would buck violently, putting repeated, extreme stress on the drive train; but even when in neutral gear, two mechanics have told me it could easily destroy my crankshaft bearings and/or other parts of the drive train. We have now tested this five times briefly in neutral gear. When we plug the pulse device in the problem occurs immediately. When we remove the device the problem goes
Complaint Details
| NHTSA Complaint ID | 1774295 |
| ODI Number | 11437379 |
| Date Filed | October 19, 2021 |
| Failure Date | September 19, 2021 |
| VIN | 2T1BR18E2WC |
Source: NHTSA Vehicle Complaints Database. Component taxonomy and severity codes are standardized by NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation.
Read our methodology — how this data is sourced, computed, and verified.