We will never buy any Toyota again!

Our brand new RAV4 with 7500 miles on ODO started developing problems:

- Intermittent sudden torque drop while traveling at 40 mph. The car would not react at all to the gas pedal and RPM's stays steady at 1500 no mater if you press gas pedal or not. After the car is restarted everything worked fine for a while..
- After stopping at red light the car sometimes won't accelerate at first and then suddenly revs up and jumps forward. It was scary to drive in traffic.
In addition it had number of small problems such as creaking sunroof, lots of squeaking sounds coming from dashboard, noisy AC fan. It felt like the car was falling apart, especially on bumpy roads.

We tried to work with the dealer (355 Toyota) who sold us this brand new car and we brought the car back to the dealership number of times with no help and no understanding. We tried other Toyota dealer with no luck as well.
The car problems used to happen once or twice a month, and the their service department was not able to reproduce these problems.
They tried to fix the sunroof (they put some lubricant around it). That seemed to work for a week and then the problem was coming back.

Since the car was brand-new and nothing seemed to work, we decided to pursue the Lemon Law.

We sent a letter to "Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A." and they forwarded us to their "Toyota Customer Assistance Center" at 1-800-331-4331
From there our case was forwarded to Maryland department (phone is 410-760-1500). They received our letter in January 2003 and we were told (according to their representative) that this process would take about two months to get our RAV4 fixed or replaced/reimbursed.
We were told that they will be contacting our dealership (355 Toyota in Rockville) to get all service records.
After compiling all data, the report should be sent to the Toyota National Center and there they will decide what to do with the car.

We were checking for the case status for about a month and finally on 02/28/03 we got an appointment at 355 Toyota for the car inspection scheduled on March 24th.

That morning we've dropped the car at the dealership and it was inspected by certified Toyota mechanic.
While getting the car back we've noticed some fresh lubricant around the sunroof. Apparently that lubricant was put at the dealership right before the inspection to hide the sunroof squeaking sound...

Report from that inspection was available only on 04/15/03, after about 4 months since we started this process! Toyota's inspector had found a problem with heater assembly only. All other problems went unnoticed. I guess the inspector should have driven that car for at lest two weeks to catch those intermittent pesky problems.

In May 2003 we received a letter from Toyota stating nothing's wrong with the car and there was nothing they could do (except the heater assembly).

We even tried to complain to Montgomery County division of consumer affairs

All these months (December 2002 - May 2003) our RAV4 was not driven. It was too risky to drive this car as it could suddenly accelerate and rear-end someone. The car was just sitting on the parking lot and sucking our money...

Finally we gave up and sold the car at Car Max...
Maybe a new owner will be more lucky.
We lost our hope in Toyota Customer Service completely and we will never buy any Toyota car again.