The owner reports that the car was still stock and that the cause of the conflagration is still unknown
- A Toyota GR Corolla owner says his stock hot hatch caught on fire and burned down.
- He even caught the incident on a dashcam as it happened.
- Now, he’s waiting for Toyota to decide how it’ll move forward with the incident.
The Toyota GR Corolla is a performance machine meant for spirited driving. For one owner, those spirited driving days are on pause after a fire consumed his hot hatch. The cause is unknown, the damage is significant, and the dashcam footage is wild.
It appears as though the driver is on a North Carolina highway based on the firetruck that shows up later. He says that just before the footage below, he had done one high-speed pull. As the video begins, he’s at just above 80 mph (128 km/h) and things seem normal. He says that first, the engine failed and that’s when he started to notice smoke.
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Without motive power he decides to coast as close to the nearest exit as he can get, hoping that emergency services can reach him faster that way. Little did he know that in the seven minutes it would take for them to arrive, his car would be engulfed in flames. He gets out, pops the hood, and can do little else but watch the Toyota burn. Evidently, this was a totally stock vehicle aside from some lowering springs.
“So far the dealer’s suspicion is that excess fuel from a potential fault was bypassing the cylinder and combusting in the turbo. That’s pure speculation right now but it makes the most sense and would mean it’s highly likely this is a one of one issue,” he says in the comment section of the video.
Interestingly, this isn’t the first and only GR Corolla to burn down in such grand fashion recently. While it might very well be unrelated, that fire began in the engine bay and ended up torching the entire car.
Two fires does not a safety-related manufacturing issue make but it’s worth keeping an eye on. Hopefully, this is the last of the somewhat unexplained spontaneous combustion connected to the GR Corolla.