What have you broken/replaced on your overweight Tacoma?

[luthj]

But doing your own maintenance or having a regular mechanic (who, like a doctor, sees trends and changes) is becoming less common.

That's been on a steady down trend as vehicles have become astonishingly low maintenance. Major suspension or drivetrain components especially. I have never had a wheel bearing fail on any vehicle I have owned or worked on under 200k miles (few even about that mileage). Thats part of the reason you can get away with overloading a vehicle. They have significant built in margin to allow trouble free operation for 100k+ miles. Exceeding the limits just means you are cutting that component life down. Its not linear though. That next 500lbs has a lot more impact than the previous 500lbs.

 

[DaveInDenver]

I don't know about astonishingly low. My Tacoma has 95,000 miles and has gone through 2 sets of wheel bearings and a clutch. The rear driveshaft carrier bearing needs to be replaced at the moment. I've replaced the front rotors, that being due to rusting from inside.

My 1991 had the original clutch until 187,000 when I elected to replace it when going to a 4.7:1 transfer case gear set. That truck ran it's original wheel bearings until 200k and were just starting to pit. The difference there is they got repacked every 50k instead of replaced.

In the 300k I owned the 1991 I barely had to think about corrosion but on this 2008 I'm cleaning, painting and spraying the underside every year trying to keep it at bay. That, though, is due to the state deciding to spread magnesium chloride like crazy and then when their budget for it got too large they started switching back to sodium chloride in some places. Colorado is no longer IMO a "low rust" place.

My thinking is people treat vehicles more now as disposable and periodic maintenance reflects that they are intended to be used up at 12 years. I didn't even get my Tacoma until it was 10 years old just like the 1991 before it. But that truck went 25 years and is still going with its 3rd owner (I was #2), which I very highly doubt is going to be true of this Tacoma even with doing much of the same things with both.

 

[luthj]

Maybe there's something wrong with your Tacoma? Toyota has been serious about reliable low maintenance cars since they came on the international auto scene. But comparing cars from the 80s and earlier its a pretty big difference. Its actually hard to find a car that has more unscheduled maintenance in the first 100k miles than say the early 90s and back.

 

[shade]

My thinking is people treat vehicles more now as disposable and periodic maintenance reflects that they are intended to be used up at 12 years.

Agreed.

 

[luthj]

I don't think light passenger vehicles have ever been considered true durables with multi decade lives. Commercial trucks are a bit different in that regard.

 

[DaveInDenver]

Maybe there's something wrong with your Tacoma? Toyota has been serious about reliable low maintenance cars since they came on the international auto scene. But comparing cars from the 80s and earlier its a pretty big difference. Its actually hard to find a car that has more unscheduled maintenance in the first 100k miles than say the early 90s and back.

I'm tough on my trucks, always have been. Going from a 1991 that was still being built like it was in 1970s and 1980s to this 2008 has been an eye opener in terms of quality and ruggedness. It's a fine truck but in many ways plainly built to lower standards and expectations. I've actually been offered my old 1991 back and am weighing going back to it. Those older Toyotas were made with a different philosophy I think, almost a light duty commercial instead of a soccer dad car with an open trunk.

Perhaps, but I can't tell if my balljoints or spherical bearings have play unless they're unloaded.

I change all the transmission, differential, and transfercase oil at my 15-20k service interval. During that time it simply makes sense to remove the wheels and unbolt my upper control arms to test for play. Once that's unbolted, it's easy to check the LCA balljoint, the UCA spherical bearing, look for tears or cracks in the CV boots etc.

We go on trips that are several thousand miles. YMMV but it doesn't make sense for me to go on a 4000 mile trip to find a broken u-joint on the prop shaft after hitting the first trail at mile 700 when I could've taken care of it during my last scheduled maintenance.

I wasn't criticizing your top shelf maintenance, just saying in general it would go a long way if a fella just took 15 minutes every 3 months when changing the oil to simply inspect the greasy side. But I suspect someone still doing their own oil is already a gear head anyway.

My truck's job is also recreation to the tune of an average of 8,300 miles a year (2008 at 95k now). It doesn't have to do daily chores or commuting. I do transfer case and axles annually (I run plain conventional 75W90) and the transmission biennially (I run MT90 so I find it lasts longer based on several UOAs over the year). I run Pennzoil Platinum on 5k or 6 month intervals in the engine.

I tend to put maybe fewer miles in a trip than you but they're more of the 3 to 5 day trips from home since a 4-hour circle from my front door is Steamboat, Telluride, Salt Lake City, Denver, Four Corners, southern Utah, etc. So I might do a trip more than 1,000 miles once a year at most.

 

[luthj]

I had a 94 DX (2wd toyota pickup). Sold it years back. Still going. Body starting to rust away, but that 22RE and 5 speed won't die...

 

[DaveInDenver]

I don't think light passenger vehicles have ever been considered true durables with multi decade lives. Commercial trucks are a bit different in that regard.

My 1991 factory service manual gave a maintenance chart that was to be repeated every 60,000 miles. So whether they expected 60K, 120k, 180k, who knows?

The FSM for my 2008 doesn't have a similar mileage chart. The owner's manual refers you to maintenance supplement, which gives tasks done at intervals out to 120,000 and doesn't say what to do after that. The assumption would be to just start over but it's not stated.

Could just be two perspectives, a difference in the traditional Japanese approach compared to the American approach to tech manuals.

Making cars that last following indefinite periodic maintainable is probably ultimately a losing business strategy and everything now is made with an engineered approach to anticipate product life. That is positive in several ways, I don't disagree. They are better built in many ways not needing as much weekend wrenching (I don't mean going way back to points but engines now don't need valve adjustments or running through an ECU and vacuum component troubleshooting).

But at the same time they are also not made to be maintained either. It's primarily about making them faster and cheaper and later work is a lower priority. The wheel bearings are a good example of this. The units are obviously designed to take 1/2 second to install and no assembly line adjustment. But replacement is much more involved. If you add up a set of tapered bearings and account for the time spent repacking you probably end up spending the same amount of money but it sure is a bigger PITA if you do it yourself. That's not even mentioning that my outlying experience is they don't last as long. Sealed is a relative term, they still get ruined going through water like the old way just that new grease and going on your way isn't possible anymore when they do get contaminated.

Same with ball joints. Toyota doesn't sell ball joints for trucks anymore. If you keep a truck long enough to need ball joints you have to buy a whole control arm. They don't even give a procedure on how to replace just ball joints. Now the aftermarket has filled the gap selling ball joints but not Toyota.

Or how about that nothing comes with Zerk fittings anymore.

 

[shade]

Making cars that last following indefinite periodic maintainable is probably ultimately a losing business strategy and everything now is made with an engineered approach to anticipate product life.

Yep.

Other than the Land Cruiser, does Toyota have any light vehicles that tend to the old philosophy? I think Jon is right about heavy vehicles being the last domain of vehicles designed for multi-decade lifespans. The old Toyota Pickup may not have been designed with that in mind, but it was clearly possible to maintain one for many years. Even if it's a good truck, I'm not sure the same is true of the Tacoma.

It appears to me that the more disposable nature of modern vehicles (well, everything) is a result of better engineering practices, tools, and material science that allows designs to be tailored to a specific budget and lifespan. When I read gripes about flimsy designs, I think that reflects more on the financial constraints put on the designers than the kind of products they're capable of developing. Back to the Land Cruiser, it's clear that Toyota knows how to make rugged vehicles that last a long time, but they're priced out of competitiveness for most market segments. I love my Tacoma, but if it were $60,000 new, I wouldn't have bought it.

 

[DaveInDenver]

Well, if you buy a Cruiser for $60,000 with an expected life of 25 years then over time it balances if you pay $30,000 twice in the same span.

Didn't the 200 Series get cartridge unit bearings? It shares similar components with the Tundra, right?

No matter how you analyze it I suspect all cars, Cruisers included, are sitting at the crossing points for cost and life expectancy. You get the quality you're paying for.

So the point I would make is that I'm tilting at windmills that I might not get Cruiser life at a Tacoma price because I was spoiled, perhaps that's the right word, that the old Hilux/Pickup was so relatively over built that this could still be true. I don't want to belabor the point but those 79-95 trucks were such high value that it couldn't be true forever.

I mean I paid $5,000 for a 100,000 old truck and spent next to nothing that wasn't by my choice for 15 years on it. I probably spent less than a $0.15 a mile operating that thing for 200,000 miles including gas and the purchase price. Of course I actually spent way more than that, 2 or 3 iterations of suspension, built an engine, the crawler gears, armor, etc. But purely the cost to operate, had to be extremely small.

 

[shade]

So the point I would make is that I'm tilting at windmills that I might not get Cruiser life at a Tacoma price because I was spoiled, perhaps that's the right word, that the old Hilux/Pickup was so relatively over built that this could still be true. I don't want to belabor the point but those 79-95 trucks were such high value that it couldn't be true forever.

I had a Pickup. 5MT, 4WD, regular cab. Fine vehicle.

I remembered removing the front OEM skid plate on it when I pulled the same part off of my Tacoma. While the Pickup part could take a hit, I'm not sure why they even bothered with the Tacoma part.

 

[kalieaire]

I wasn't criticizing your top shelf maintenance, just saying in general it would go a long way if a fella just took 15 minutes every 3 months when changing the oil to simply inspect the greasy side. But I suspect someone still doing their own oil is already a gear head anyway.

My truck's job is also recreation to the tune of an average of 8,300 miles a year (2008 at 95k now). It doesn't have to do daily chores or commuting. I do transfer case and axles annually (I run plain conventional 75W90) and the transmission biennially (I run MT90 so I find it lasts longer based on several UOAs over the year). I run Pennzoil Platinum on 5k or 6 month intervals in the engine.

I tend to put maybe fewer miles in a trip than you but they're more of the 3 to 5 day trips from home since a 4-hour circle from my front door is Steamboat, Telluride, Salt Lake City, Denver, Four Corners, southern Utah, etc. So I might do a trip more than 1,000 miles once a year at most.

That's fair and I didn't take any offense. The 4000 mile reference was actually a recent trip to that area of Utah, Colorado, and Arizona. So a few hundred for you ends up being a few thousand for me. But my truck is a 2012, and I've got <50k miles on it. 15-20k maintenance comes once every 18-36 months depending on how much time off I get. But yeah, in my situation, major maintenance before a trip is always the prudent bet because a little extra time during seasonal downtime is worth it during a 9 day mileage bender.

I'm running MT90 in the transmission and transfercase, and Redline 75W90 in the diffs. I bought everything in 5 gallon buckets so I saved a lot. Usually if you reach out to an autoparts distributor and buy all your parts at once, they give you a fair discount since the sales guys have some leeway in terms of cost, which is what I did when I bought my upgraded bits for the Tacoma. Motor Oil is still PP like you, or whatever's cheap like Castrol in the 5 gallon bottle at Walmart. Toyota filters are cheap enough when I buy them by the case. They work in both the Tacoma and my 98 4runner so no sweat there.

--

Regarding your following post regarding balljoints, yeah that's kind of annoying, but honestly I would replace the whole lower control arm w/ something beefier like a Total Chaos option if my BJs were bad.

Other than the Land Cruiser, does Toyota have any light vehicles that tend to the old philosophy?

My Scion xB from 2004 (sold through 2007) and the following model sold until 2014 are relatively easy to maintain. Yes, the Lower Control Arm and Balljoint is sold as a single unit, but I can get a replacement for $30-35 bucks and it's the same lower control arm for the xa, xb, yaris, and echo. Similar for the newer models. There are certain wear items, like suspension, that are easy to repair. But other stuff that's build with the vehicle to cut down on costs are easy to replace with non-oem repairs. Like if there's a problem w/ your fuel hardline, you can still replace it with flexible line and bypass the original and everything will be fine.

Despite the seemingly lack of "repairability", it's still doable. ?‍♂️

 

[kalieaire]

my xB has 195,000 miles. I've replaced the transmission and clutch, I've replaced the wheel bearings on all 4 corners. I'm replacing the lower control arms (for the balljoints) and engine mounts soon. I've replaced the door lock solenoids too.

Beside changing motor oil, filters, and periodically the transmission fluid, it's been g2g.

 

[dstefan]

Other than the Land Cruiser, does Toyota have any light vehicles that tend to the old philosophy?

Well, IDK about light, but I’d say the 4Runner is closer, at least in build quality. Way more payload than the Tacoma, and just clearly more substantial than my 2nd gen Tacoma. Just learning my wife’s 2018, but real impressed. Made in Japan still. Based apparently on the Prado chassis. 'Course still not as maintainable as the earlier philosophy vehicles.

 

[shade]

Well, IDK about light, but I’d say the 4Runner is closer, at least in build quality. Way more payload than the Tacoma, and just clearly more substantial than my 2nd gen Tacoma. Just learning my wife’s 2018, but real impressed. Made in Japan still. Based apparently on the Prado chassis. 'Course still not as maintainable as the earlier philosophy vehicles.

By "light", I meant light trucks & cars, not commercial vehicles, like a Hino.

If I hadn't needed the bed, I would've gotten a 4Runner. The Tacoma has always been half a step down from the 4R on features, and I think they may benefit from a combination of body-on-frame & unibody construction. I'd much rather a 4R than an FJ Cruiser.