- A GR Corolla owner found a dealer-installed GPS tracker in his car even though it was paid off.
- Initially, the Toyota dealer denied it had installed the device before ultimately admitting it.
- Now, the owner’s legal council is working to determine if the dealer installed it illegally.
Sometimes car owners discover cool features long after their initial purchase—like windows that all roll down with a long press of the unlock button or a hidden storage cubby few know aboit. In Anthony Do’s case, the unexpected ‘feature’ he found was a dealer-installed GPS tracker on his Toyota GR Corolla, which he was unaware of, as we first reported back in June.
Now, his council says that it’s reviewed about half of the purchase agreement and hasn’t found any mention of the device. It evidently doesn’t expect to at this point either. The firm has suffered some adverse effects of Hurricane Beryl though and so it’ll be a little while longer before the whole issue is settled.
More: Toyota GR Corolla Buyer Finds Dealer-Installed GPS Tracker Hidden In Car
Do highlighted the finding of that tracker in a video posted to his channel on June 9. In it, he reveals that he’d heard of some owners who had battery drains or an inability to tune the car because of a piggyback GPS tracker. Sure enough, that was the issue with his car when it had a dead battery after just a few weeks of sitting in his garage. In his first update about the situation, he confronted the dealer.
According to Do, a higher-up at the dealership initially denied that it ever installed such a tracker to begin with. Once confronted with the evidence, not only in Do’s first video about the situation, but with the tracker itself, the same person admitted that yes, the dealer did install it. Their argument was that it was intended simply to track cars in the case that they’re stolen from the dealership specifically.
Do says that doesn’t make sense as he was on site when his car arrived at the dealer itself. Evidently, the same dealer employee then tried to de-escalate the situation by claiming that only a few people had access to the GPS data. Even then, that’s not a great situation since, as Do rightly points out, that access can fall into the wrong hands.
More: Is Your Car Spying On You? Hidden GPS Trackers On The Rise
Why sue a dealer like this? Carscoops has reached out to Do for comment but has not heard back as of this writing. It could simply be out of a desire to set precedence against dealers who engage in this sort of sketchy behavior. It could be in hopes of scoring material damages.
If we hear back, we’ll update this story.