Avoid These Toyotas Like the Plague

today i'm going to tell you the truth about toyota oil storage problems in their engines and oil burning problems now sure toyota makes great cars but like any manufacturer they've had screw-ups and they had problems with both oil sludge that led to engine damage and plain old-fashioned oil burning because the pistons and the piston rings were poorly made and wore out too fast now the first thing i want to talk about is the oil sludge problem engine oil after prolonged exposure to heat and the explosions and chemical reactions inside an engine can break down and create sludge gunk now when i was a young mechanic this was a big problem because they started out with just plain old oil it had no detergent in it and so the sludge would all go in the bottom and clog everything up but for ages they've had detergent oil and the purpose of the detergent is to keep all the crud in suspension so instead of making sludge it flows through the system and stays in the oil that you change when it's dirty now the toyota oil sludge problem occurred in some of the engines before 2003. we're building up too much sludge and i personally have seen v6 toyota engines go bad because of this and in respect to this in 2007 toyota settled a class-action lawsuit they said that they would repair toyota engines for free which if asked me it's kind of a sleazy deal because if you had a 97 that was 10 years before this agreement so you wouldn't get anything out of them then and the last one covered 2002 since that was 2007. basically you were only getting three years more warranty on the thing kind of a raw deal if you ask me as you can see here it covered a whole range of vehicles you can read them as they go down here you can even look it up yourself if you want it covered quite a few toyota and lexus vehicles and realizing toyota's behalf the vehicles that people did complain about are less than one percent failure so it's not like they all do it even if you bought a used one i've had many customers buy those used ones on the list they had no problems with oil consumption personally on the soil sludge thing i think quite a bit had to do with the owners not properly maintaining their cars in my own personal experience of customers cars that i maintained correctly changed the engine oil filter every five thousand miles none of them had sludge problems now if you do have one of these engines and you're worried go buy the extreme service precaution like some of them will say change it every five well me i do mainly stop and go city driving so mine's always extreme and i actually change mine every 3000 miles or once a year and usually it's once a year because i don't even drive that anymore now the second problem i'm going to talk about here is toyota engines and excessive oil consumptions now as they age all cars are going to burn somewhere even my old 94 celica hey it burns a little bit of oil but it's got 240 000 miles on it it burns about half a quart every 3000 miles but i never add it because i don't even drive 3 000 miles in a year anymore so i just change the oil once a year and leave it at that now since toyota engines are used to near perfection in their vehicles i've seen them where yeah they'll burn a quart of oil maybe every thousand twelve hundred miles they're not like the chryslers and mitsubishi's that you see they'll burn two or three quarts of oil a week because they're really worn but for a toyota even that's too much oil consumption now even i've had customers that they're driving and when it's island their oil pressure light comes on they find out the oil's too low you burn a quart of oil so every 1200 miles or so and you go to the dealer and they say oh that's normal or gm's been saying that for years it may be normal for a particular vehicle as it wears but it's not normal for a well-built engine to use that much oil church of mine are pain in the butt adding oil every once in a while but it's worse than that because modern cars have catalytic converters oxygen sensors that's all in the exhaust system and if you get a lot of oil burning the oil is going to burn and that residue is going to clog up the oxygen sensors it's going to ruin the catalytic converters and let's say you got a car that's got three catalytic converters it can cost you two to three grand to have them all replaced not a cheap fix so you really don't want an oil burning engine these days it's not like the old days in the early 70s a friend of mine got the neighbor's car for a dollar and they gave it to him for a dollar and that thing went through a quarter oil every 50 miles with an old ford so he just carried four or five quarts of oil in a trunk and when he needed it he'd pour the oil in no catalytic converter a simple carburetor those things actually could run quite some time the only thing you had to do was when the spark plugs would carbon up and get all clogged not fire you just take out the eight spark plugs and put eight new ones in but modern cars are so much more complex you really can't drive them when they're burning oil especially that type of oil now for this oil burning issue in 2011 toyota issued this bulletin 2006 to 2011 toyotas with the 2az slash fe engine have excessive oil consumption and may have misfire codes because of the soil consumption now that's a four-cylinder engine you see a lot of them in the four-cylinder camrys but their warranty again was kind of a sleazy one it wasn't a recall was a tsb a technical service bulletin their thing was you could bring it in and they test your engine and if you drive your car 1200 miles and bring it back and it's more than a quart low on oil then they decided they're going to replace the pistons and the piston rings on it this only lasted for 60 months or 60 000 miles the original factory warranty which is kind of a sleazy deal really they wouldn't even do it on this old thing that has 240 000 miles it only burns half a quarter every 3000 miles and they were saying it has to burn more than a quart every 1200 miles kind of a raw deal there again now i did have customers that had piston rings the pistons replaced on ones that had less than 60 000 miles and were less than 60 months old but i also have customers that are still driving theirs and they burn oil and they burn a quart every thousand or 800 miles toyota didn't fix it for them they said oh no you're out of the period i recently had a customer of mine bring one in to service and she said i was making this noise when i started up and it goes away so i checked the engine oil and there was nothing on a dipstick and when i changed it only half a quart of oil came out instead of four quarts you only had half a quart of oil left and she said oh well you know i just had the oil changed in june which was july august september october four months ago so she thought it was good i said no you got an older car now well past any other warranty period i said you got to check the oil every once in a while and add it as it burns she's lucky it didn't destroy the engine so if you have one of these vehicles got a lot of mileage you want to check your oil every once in a while and put it in as it goes up and here's a list of the engines that are covered on the top and then on the bottom and like i said toyota on these piston and piston ring engines decide that they'll replace them for five years or sixty thousand miles the original factory warranty but that's kind of raw deal they're pretty much admitting they weren't built correctly and they're not standing behind them all they should say hey you want one of these things we'll replace them free regardless that's something they should have done but i guess due to the millions of cars they made with these engines they don't want to give away billions of dollars fixing them for free just saying well it's under the factory warranty because legally that's all they have to do now in the past i used to tell people when i asked about car warranties i said don't worry about the car warranty itself worry about whether it's built or not go buy a toyota then since they don't break you don't care about the warranty well in this case you do have to worry about the warranty on those engines now they don't make those particular engines anymore the new ones haven't had any problems with excessive oil consumption they've redesigned them and they built them better but they did make mistakes then and although they made it a little bit their true admission was hey yeah we kind of screwed up and we'll fix them for 60 000 miles after that it's your buck that's going to pay for it and really there they did a missed service to their owners i mean uh my son 2007 camry and yes it burns oil toyota refused to fix it for free because it had too many miles on it it's got less than half of what my celica has what would you have an old one like this that burns half a quart every 3 000 miles or one that today is burning about a quart of oil every 900 miles so now you know the truth about toyota oil sludge and oil consumption and especially if you're looking at a used toyota check out that list i gave don't buy it used or take it to a mechanic to do a wet and dry compression test to see if the engine was still in tip-top shape or whether it's an oil burner and you're not going to buy that one used 2007-11 toyota camry hybrid 2007-2009 toyota camry 2009 toyota corolla 2009 toyota matrix 2006-2008 toyota rav4 2007 to 2008 toyota solara 2007 to 2009 scion tc and 2008 to 2009 scion xb or of course if you're a do yourself type of guy since most of them are four cylinder engines just take out all the spark plugs and look at them and if they've got carbon build up on the spark plug tips and it's all black don't buy the car it's that simple the recall of 1.9 million toyotas for fuel pump problems now sure came a shock to me because toyota is known for quality products to give you an example the fuel pump in this 26 year old celica is still the original one as is the fuel pump on this 2007 matrix and this 2002 lexus es 300 so i found it astounding that toyotas that are new or one or two years old they're gonna have to recall them for fuel pump problems i tried to read about it they just say fuel pump problems toyota has no fix for it yet i called the dealer they gave me the same line ah something with the fuel pumps they don't know what they don't know how they're gonna fix them to me that's uncalled for they need to give the information out to people who are buying these cars people buy toyotas because they are known relatively bulletproof not break down not have problems you don't want your fuel pump stopping while you're going 70 miles an hour down the road now fuel pump in the modern car is kind of like the heart inside you pump the fuel to the fuel injectors just like your heart this thing conks out your engine's not gonna run now back in the old day of carburetors fuel systems were much simpler they had a mechanical fuel pump that bolted to the engine and as the cam spun it would pump the pump and it would get anywhere from one and a half to two pounds pressure into the carburetor where it would spray into the engine to make it run and motorcycles hey they were even simpler they didn't have a fuel pump they had gravity feed where the gasoline would just go into the carburetors by gravity because they were under the gas tank the monitor vehicles are much more complex they got electric pumps that put out pressure fuel pressure regulators when they go to the fuel injectors they have to have enough pressure so these tiny little holes can spray the fuel and atomize it so it runs efficiently older pumps like this they put out anywhere from 20 to 60 psi or so even this normal one hey it's got to put out just the right amount of pressure like i said can be anywhere from 20 to 65 cars have different systems but if it doesn't have that pressure correct all the time car won't run right so if you've got one of these late model toyotas and it's going to be recalled they're not even telling us now what they're going to actually do which i think is kind of a raw deal but be that as it may all cars today politically have these electric fuel pumps in the gas tank you never think about it they're just sitting in there quietly pumping fuel kind of like your heart you don't think about that and with people a lot of times the cars are just like themselves they don't think about it until it's too late the thing breaks so i'm going to give you some tips on how to keep your fuel pumps from crapping out now as i said most of these pumps are inside the gas tank now the gas tank is a sealed system so you want to make sure it remains sealed make sure you got a good gas cap it seals out impurities if this is ripped or you get a code for evap leak this could be just worn out make sure you got a good gas cap if it doesn't seal it lets air and water vapor in it if you leave it off rain can get in there the water will destroy these pumps so make sure you got a good cap and then when you fill it up turn it until it clicks you hear it click that means it's sealed you don't want impurities getting into your gas tank and speaking of impurities you do need to change your fuel filter every now and then now the fuel filter filters impurities from getting into your tiny little fuel injectors so they're between the pump and the fuel injectors and what happens is they get too old and they're filled up with crud they build up too much back pressure on these pumps and guess what too much back pressure the pump works harder it's going to burn out faster and sure the fuel filters aren't like my old celica where they're right under the hood where you can easily unbolt them put them in like in a zo7 matrix filters inside the gas tank but in this case out of sight out of mind you want to keep it in mind and change it every once in a while and yes it's kind of a pain in this case you got to take the back seat out get to the access panel take that off take the whole assembly out and replace the filter but just to understand you can often get after market once or 20 30 bucks sometimes the whole fuel filter assembly with the pump can cost you seven or eight hundred dollars you don't want that seven eight hundred dollar assembly to go bad early because the stupid filter's clogged up and here don't listen to any bologna where people say well you gotta buy the old pump and filter as an assembly they all come apart and you can replace just the filtering assembly you don't have to buy the whole thing if it's running fine but you want to change your filter because it's been in there for years and years now another thing that you have to be leery about to keep your fuel pump from going bad you think your car runs out of gas you look at the gauge it's on empty don't keep trying to start it if it doesn't start right up because as nutty as it sounds these pumps are actually lubricated by gasoline the gasoline comes in and the bearings inside are lubricated by gasoline realize it's all a liquid when it's inside the gas tank and the gasoline also helps cool them down so they don't get too hot from pumping hard all the time but if you run out of gas and this thing now is sucking air the air will ruin the bearings so let's say you run out of gas you sit there for 10 minutes trying to start the car run run run run run run run run run run if you keep cranking it you can destroy this pump so don't crank it if you're out of gas so if you're one of those people like playing games that you wait until the low fuel light is on a while before you fill it up don't do that because if you don't run out of gas and suck here you can ruin this expensive little baby and like i say look at this one's 26 years old it's still running fine it's got the original pump and here again i'd love to know what the problem toyota is having with the pumps but i even contacted them they wouldn't give me any information so they're not going to give you any information until they feel like it now a lot of times people ask me about gasoline they'll say scotty i don't like to add ethanol to the gasoline to boost the octane i see on the pump it says may contain 10 percent ethanol well of course it does if it says may and they're bumping it up so they can do 15 they say oh is that going to ruin my fuel pump fuel injectors well not if it's only 10 to 15 percent because they have additives in them to keep the alcohol from damaging the pump and the fuel injectors if it's fresh gas now let's say you got gas that's been sitting for two years in a container in your garage no don't use it modern gasoline cannot be stored for long periods of time so you don't ever want to use old gas in a modern car throw it away i mean if you got some old gas you want to use it in your leaf blower go right ahead you know probably won't bother that at all but in a modern car you got to make sure you have fresh gasoline you don't want to use old stuff then maybe the anti-corrosive inhibitors are gone and the alcohol net gas could cause a problem don't try to run a non-flex fuel car with the e85 that's 85 ethanol and 15 gasoline realize that the flex fuel cars are made so they can run on all kinds of levels of alcohol they have special pumps special fuel lines special fuel injectors special oxygen sensors on the exhaust to measure how much alcohol and how much gasoline is in the mix they can run perfect on any combination but if you stick e85 in a regular car that isn't a flex fuel one that's made to run on plain old gasoline that's way too much alcohol and it will corrode cars that are not flex fuel because too much alcohol in a non-flex fuel car will often cause problems now i'm a professional mechanic so i got a little test kit you can buy them on amazon if you want they're only like 15 bucks and if you take a sample of the gasoline use the kit you'll see what percentage alcohol is in and i have had customers bring me cars here that didn't run right and they were regular cars now the max they could have would be 15 alcohol some of those had 25 30 percent alcohol in them and they were no longer running correctly not enough at some point in time they put e85 in it when they shouldn't have or if the gas they bought to pump was labeled wrong or perhaps made wrong at the refinery and they put too much alcohol in it but that's not a good thing for fuel pumps in any modern car that isn't a flex fuel car now as you can see with my own cars i buy quality gasoline from regular stations i change the fuel filters you don't need to change that often i think i've changed these things once every six seven years not something you have to do all that often and you use quality fuel keep a nice tight gas cap on it if you have a well-built vehicle that fuel pump can last indefinitely now some companies like gm just use cheaply made fuel pumps i am forever changing fuel pumps on gm products they burn out a lot i mean i do have to say before this new thing about toyotas and they recalled 1.9 million of them for problems with the fuel pump even they don't say exactly what it is i have only ever changed two fuel pumps on in-tank toyotas in my entire 52-year career of fixing them and one of those was in an old supra the real supers that remained japan not the german bmw one and the pump had rusted out because the guide let the tank go dry and then something leaked on the cap and there was a lot of water in the gas tank and a gas tank and the pump inside were corroded solid i mean it was just solid orange rust the gas tank the fuel filter the fuel pump it all had to be replaced that had nothing to do with the car not just because it was 30 something years old and it wasn't taken care of and water got in a gas tank so now you know a little bit more about electric fuel pumps in your car that are inside the gas tank and what you can do to ensure that they last as long as possible especially if you've got one of those american designs where you got to drop the whole gas tank because they were too cheap to put an access panel on it and that can cost a fortune and invariably it'll happen when the tank's almost full so then you got to empty the tank out because it weighs too much and then you got to do something with the old gasoline it creates a gigantic mess that you want to avoid if at all possible so if you never want to miss another one of my new car repair videos remember to ring that bell [Music] you

Channel: Scotty Kilmer

Views: 1,070,689

Keywords: are toyotas reliable, buying a new toyota, buying a toyota, car, car advice, car diy, car repair, car review, cars, diy, repair, scotty kilmer, should i buy a toyota, toyota, toyota car review, toyota cars, toyota engine, toyota problems, toyota review, 5 toyotas you should never buy, cars not to buy, worst cars, worst car, bad cars, cars you should never buy, the end, the end of toyota reliability, toyota reliability, I've been saying this for years, toyotas, worst toyotas

Id: yieRrIZkH_E

Length: 19min 58sec (1198 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 30 2020