Car Companies Tried to Stop Me from Releasing This List of Worst to Best Car Brands to Buy

i'm going to talk about this 2007 nissan maxima is it a good car is it a bad car now when this maximo was new it was a 28 000 car now it's a 2007. even the books that generally inflate value say that this thing is worth anywhere from seventeen hundred to thirty three hundred dollars today now my customer bought this thing a year ago for thirty five hundred dollars and the first thing he said to me was yeah i wish i would have bought a toyota instead to which i responded yeah but you're not going to get much of a toyota for 3 500 i mean check this car out it's a nice looking car still got a great paint job white reflects heat holds up over time the wheels are still good nice lines to it there's no bashes or anything it is a nice looking car but alas looks can be deceiving and they often are an older nissan i tell people you want to buy one buy a new one keep it 100 000 miles you might not have any problems at all but this baby now that it's got some mileage on it it's got 152 719 miles guess what it's showing its age it needs quite a bit of work now in this case this baby has three catalytic converters and they're going out it is typical on nissan's and i've often had people buy the cheaper aftermarket catalytic converters and they still fail to test if you have to buy three cats for this car and you buy oem factory cats that's more money than the car's worth it runs decently most of the time especially after you put some cat cleaner in the tank in order to get it legally passed in an inspection if you live in an area that has a mission's inspecting you'd have to replace those cats in man that is one expensive job and it's typical they almost always go bad on these nissan v6 engines when they get mileage like this one that's like 150 on it almost invariably they're going to go bad now once in a while they get too clogged up and it really runs bad when you put the cleaner and it cleans it out so let's say you lived in a place like montana where they don't inspect cars for emissions you could just keep adding cleaner you know and live with that but if you live in a place where they inspect cars for emissions especially california you wouldn't want to touch this car with a 10 foot pole and you might have noticed i got ac gauges hooked up because the ac system is leaking that's the reason the guy brought the car in in the first place because it's hot here in houston and he wants to see what's wrong with the ac i'm gonna fill it up put some dye in look for big leaks if i don't find him just tell him just keep filling the stupid thing up because as it's running you can hear the compressor rattling a little you know at some point the compressor itself is going to go out that's a lot of money on one of these no if you don't have to have ac you don't care but here in houston that's important hence they have extremely low resale value under this hole now as we look inside hey the interior's still in excellent shape that's how they sell these things they're comfortable they handle great they got a nice nissan engine and a good suspension system and as we check the back a lot of room in the back seat and a decent trunk there's some good room in here for stuff notice the jumper cables and as i said v6 engine it's very reliable this one puts out 255 horsepower not insane horsepower but back in 2007 that was still a decent amount and it's a very zippy car the problem is this age these things just tend to fall apart they look great but it's all a facade the owner says he's got a clunk on the left front let's jack it up see what's going on there find a good jack point there's one and up we go so first we'll look inside we can see it's wet in here so the strut's starting to wear and i can see and feel a ridge kind of a scalloped ridge a worn strut can do that ass can worn front end parts and when i wiggle this back and forth i can feel there's some play in the power steering rack so that means the very expensive power steering rack is worn eventually that'll need replacing again a brand new one that'll be more than the car is actually worth although that is something you can live with it's not too bad yet it's not going clunker clunker i've had customers driving years that way they were just buying new front tires maybe every 15 000 miles because they wear out too fast and as long as they didn't clunk when you pulled on it yeah you hit a big bump you hear a clunk up there they would just live with that do not expect perfection if you buy one of these things used with this kind of mileage on it so let's put it down take it for a spin now as we can see in the door here this is a nissan it's a japanese car but if you notice here it says manufactured by nissan motor company this one was actually put together in tennessee so it started up it starts right up most japanese cars will now you do have to say it's a pretty quiet car but if you listen you can do the power steering groaning because that's a little worn but it still works and let's see how this thing with 152 000 miles accelerates on your arc get set go it's still got some decent acceleration they are made for speed that's how they sell these things in the first place they're fast they're fun to drive but as they age like this one they become endless money pits if you want perfection but do not buy one of these things to pay hardly any money for it and expect you're going to be able to drive at 20 000 miles a year as a luxury sports sedan because it'll bite you in the rear end and cost you a small fortune to keep it in tip-top shape now this is a 2014 kia optima hybrid the original list price was like thirty two thousand four hundred dollars for this particular model he bought it used and he paid 17 out the door they wanted more it said a lot a long time they don't sell like hotcakes to say the least and he offered him 17 and he said no and then they called them back have you come right now we'll sell it to you out the door for 17. paid almost half of what the new one was with that small amount of mileage he hasn't put any money into it yet but since this fall the coolant's been leaking a little and his wife was driving it the other day down the road and just died and it turns out it was the main fuse for the hybrid system things do wear out but i'm always leery myself when a main fuse blows it's a big amp fuse it takes a lot to blow one of those fuses we'll put our scan tool on do a little analysis now originally it was 125 amp and a dealer looked up a bunch of stuff they replaced it with a 150 amp i don't know about that the engineers put fuses for a certain rating for a reason and all of a sudden they start throwing higher ones in i'm assuming they're finding that the hybrid battery's taking a little more power than it should as at age so they're bumping the fuse up so it doesn't keep popping the fuse let's hook up the scan tool see what it says now i do have to say that kia does have a hundred thousand mile warranty on a hybrid system and he had the stuff fixed to free they didn't charge him anything so he's thinking about he gets 200 000 miles get rid of the thing because his other car is a toyota corolla that's never broken down and it's a 2003 it's a lot older than this thing is and it's never broken at all and see there's no global codes everything's green so let's start it up even though it's not going to do anything because it's a hybrid and it's just sitting here we'll put the ac on because i'm hot as can be you hear the engine's coming on now the ac can run a little while with the engine turn off but not that long that turns the engine back on but i'm really disappointed because nothing like my toilet or lexus is below big stream i'm not getting enough air on me as far as i'm concerned let's go to system oem enhanced about 14 kia optima hybrid yes here we go now there's no enhanced data either gonna check everything and that's awful one of these hybrids you can't mess around with these things unless you have a high level scanner this is the lowest level scanner that i would ever use on one of these if things really got hairy i'd get out my five thousand dollars canada this thing is rated at 35 miles a gallon highway and 37 in the city because it has regenerate bricks it's only getting 32 so it's getting kind of low gas mileage it's not that high mileage it's only 74 593. but now there's the scanner it's done all the modules let's look through the modules the seat belts we don't really care about that that stuff's a bunch of nonsense anyways the electric parking brake has codes so there's a smart junction box we'll check the smart junction box and see what that says turn signal right hand rear open circuit well it's working perfectly fine so who cares about that it also says turn signal left for your circuit open that works too so we can ignore that now you can see something squirrely because the calculated load value is 51 52 and the car's just idling we're not even moving d the equivalence ratio is going 1.5321.487 1.47 it's kind of moving around as you can see now it's going all over the place not squanders 0.984 it's really moving around a car that's just idling should not go all over the place like that that's probably one of the reasons it's getting pretty bad gas mileage for a car i mean i've seen these things get 38 39 this is only getting 32. as you can see now it's all the way to 1.484 it's all over the place now that's the bank one sensor one i would advise changing it there are actually a zillion things can affect it make it do weird things but with advanced lighting like crazy like that i would have that sense of change and since that's part of the anti-pollution system here should cover it under the hundred thousand mile warranty so really as an educated guess i'd say change bank one sensor one the air fuel ratio sensor it could be bad maybe the wiring's bad something's a missile now the voltage is good in the control module so far i haven't seen anything weird other than that sensor data the engine has run 16 hours 19 minutes since a trouble code was cleared so this did have a trouble code at some point in time so he basically learned is it doesn't trip any codes now but it did 16 hours ago of run time it had a trouble code on it now the only tells me you wish you would see my videos before he bought this because his old corollas never stranded him and this thing now is stranded once and it's got the oddest thing it loses coolant but nobody can find where it's going took off it was on full now it's down a little bit now in one month he only has to add that little bit from the half to the house not that much cooler but it's going somewhere and it shouldn't in a vehicle this new now i can't see any leaks anywhere so i'm going to tell them to put some ultraviolet leak dye for the cooling system and then run it for a few weeks and as he adds coolant when it's cold look with the uv light and yellow sunglasses cray it's not a head gasket or something going you never know and i'm always going to tell them change the radiator cap could be as dumb as it's just seeping a little gas and it'll lose a little cooling over time now overall they're pretty basic engine stuff they got normal fuel injection on the intake it's not gdi it's not an extremely complicated car except for the hybrid system now you can see it's a relatively noisy engine but with this kind of mileage almost all kia sound like this the quality control in our factory isn't that great they've had to rebuild a lot of engines with timing chains valves piston rings they're not the most solid engines in the world but i do have to say this is probably a better one because this one was made in korea the ones that are made in the united states had a problem with some of the machinery building them that's why the engines blew up he was saying his friend had a one year newer kia with a turbo they had to replace the guy's entire engine because it went out on them if you are going to get a kia get a korean one like this look at the door says made in korea it's a much better bet than buying one made over here from my experience let's take it for a road test now it's pretty quiet i got the acm but you can barely hear anything and the engine is running now gotta say it is very smooth not a fan of the transmission it's kind of wiggly wiggly-wobbly now this does have a six-speed automatic transmission it's not a cvt but it's kind of wonky if you ask me i'm not impressed by either the acceleration or the indirectness of acceleration you get kind of a nothing happens and then it starts moving and makes an awful lot of noise and take into consideration that even though it was getting like 32 miles a gallon that was all done in eco mode the best gas mileage mode of them all not the power mode i got it in power mode now and it doesn't seem to have all that much power now it doesn't handle all that bad a little bit of oversteer but yeah nothing outrageous but let's see what this thing can do theoretically it has 199 horsepower with the gas motor and the electric motor so here we go while it's not throwing me back in my seat and like i say the tranny's a little wonky for 200 horsepower man doesn't feel like 200 horsepower it's weak on acceleration and i'm telling you as hot as it is today i wish these blowers blew about three times more volume air i gotta stick my head way up here to get any cool air on me they just did not blow that well how you guys in korea where you made this car maybe it doesn't get that hot in korea i know it snows a lot in the winter but man it gets hot here in tennessee just like in texas and you need to upgrade your blower motors to get a little more oomph coming out when it's hot outside and i do have to say this manual shift option is absolute garbage i hardly do anything at all i mean you're going down the road you try to shift it can't even feel it do much you downshift there's a big lag before it kicks in i am not impressed by this transmission so in the case of this particular kia optima you get a hybrid you're supposed to have more acceleration with the electric motor and better gas mileage this thing has neither it doesn't have acceleration or gas mileage some of that could very well be duke because the main oxygen sensor the air fuel ratio sensor the one on the top of the engine could be bad it was giving squirrely data and if it gives squirrely data cars not going to run right because as it runs now this is not an impressive vehicle to say the least i've been in ones that ran a lot better than this but all in all considering this car was close to thirty four thousand dollars when it was new boy i could think of a lot of better things to do with thirty four thousand dollars buy one of these things no wonder it sat on the lot for months before the guy bought it if i would have road tested this car i would have told people don't buy it there's something wrong with it it doesn't go fast enough doesn't get good enough gas mileage because really when you step on the gas yeah it makes noise but it really doesn't take off all that fast and you got a real lag it just doesn't feel responsive and considering that the thing stranded on a highway and blew a main fuse and what they did was put a bigger fuse in it went from like 135 amp to 150 amp fuse to me boy i'd be sure to get rid of this thing before the 100 000 mile hybrid warranty was up for sure what you should know about subaru before you buy one scotty's not a big fan of subaru but i've got customers with them and some of them are happy so i'm going to show you what to look for if you're planning on buying a subaru as an example of this four-year-old outback it's loaded it's four-door fancy high gas mileage setup on it the partial zero emissions vehicle with symmetrical all-wheel drive now my customer owns this had always bought toyotas oh he did a little research he said i hope you'll work on subaru scotty because i'm going to be getting the subaru in his case it actually made sense this thing is like 27 500 when it was new four years ago if you were gonna get the toyota equivalent with all-wheel drive and everything it was about 45 000 so yes i can understand why he bought the subaru we're almost talking twenty thousand dollars less than an equivalent toyota take a look four-year-old vehicle what's it got on it sixteen thousand miles so he's averaging like four thousand miles a year at that rate maybe a single even outlast stem they generally don't have problems until they get to be higher mileage now as for the overall subaru vehicles generally they're not race cars this is a relatively heavy vehicle it's got a four cylinder boxer engine it has been souped up it puts out 175 horsepower so it's fine for cruising around in i personally advise people with the subarus to stay away from the v6 engine it puts out like 275 horsepower they just have more problems as they age that is basically a six cylinder boxer engine like a porsche and they have historical problems of head gaskets blowing and the horsepower they put out a lot of times burns out the transmissions because they're relatively weak transmissions in these subarus but as with all subarus except for their brz it's got that fancy all-wheel drive system if you really have to have a good all-wheel drive system at a subaru's make a good one that's one of their big sales point you live where it snows a lot going mountains going mud that's where they get a lot of their sails from buffalo where it snows a lot toronto a lot of people like subarus but me i live in downtown houston and the last time i checked the nearest subaru dealer is like 18 miles away that shows you there aren't that many of them now they did try a few decades back here in houston there were a lot more subaru dealers but a lot of them just went out of business they aren't that popular here but their intelligent all-wheel drive system it does work good in the snow i've rented them when i went to lake tahoe in the winter and i've had them in the rocky mountains in the winter and in heavy rain and they do handle quite well you get a lot of safety if you got an all-wheel drive system all four wheels driving you're gonna stick to the road better now some of the older four-cylinder boxer engines had valve spring problems they had to rebuild the whole engines and they botched up a bunch of them too doing the repairs this is a newer one so far it hasn't had any of those problems i think they fixed that but if you're thinking about buying a used subaru check out the history of that year's model and if it's one that had the recall for the valve springs stay away and not even think about buying it whether it was repaired or not i wouldn't touch those now one of the biggest problems that i find with subarus is this is kind of a niche car maker man their parts replacement parts can be super expensive and often you can only get them at the subaru dealer as an example whenever i do need parts which isn't often 24 year old celica they're pretty readily available there's a big aftermarket so i can get decent aftermarket parts at a good price but subarus heck i can get one that's five six years old find out oh that park's only available at the dealer and it's going to be 350 bucks where an equivalent part from my toyota might be 80 realize although the price of the subarus is much lower than the toyotas when they're brand new the parts are the other way around the parks cost a lot more and let's face it with these boxer design engine i mean we're talking about dinosaur technology still kind of a specialist thing fixing them and it's often hard to find a good mechanic who knows how to work on a subarus so take that in consideration if you're the type of guy who's going to buy a car and drive it into the ground you're going to have some repairs over time if people can't fix them reliably and at a decent cost you might think twice but if you're like my customer and don't use them much that might be an okay buy for you check out this there's remnants of snails and acorns obviously a squirrel has been living under here because he parks it a lot out there warning about that and if you really want to have an all-wheel drive vehicle that has a very good all-wheel drive system subaru's been perfecting that stuff for ages it might not be a bad thing getting yourself a subaru this thing costs almost 20 grand less than an equivalent toyota highlander that's a lot of money differential and as far as i'm concerned that's got to be one of the big reasons that subaru sells a reasonable amount of their vehicles in the united states last year they sold over 600 000 vehicles so if you're looking for something got a nice all-wheel drive system isn't a race car by any stretch of the imagination but you want transportation that's going to be reliable and not get you stuck in the snow or the mud or the ice ah maybe a subaru's for you the acura ilx in this case it's a 2016. and as you can see it's black on black because the owner uses this as an uber black driver my customer bought it because he wanted to make the extra money doing uber black while he's going to college but he didn't want to buy the most expensive one so he got one that was the best price that qualified for uber black now of course the main thing about acuras is they're fancy hondas the engines are great this particular one is a four cylinder puts out 201 horsepower and it's made it to an eight speed dct transmission and in my opinion this automatic transmission is one of the best that honda well you can call them accurate the same company has ever come up with it has paddle shifters that actually work quite well because this eight-speed dual-clutch transmission was really a game changer for honda and acura it uses a conventional torque converter and when it's set up with the dual clutch setup that it has it engages one clutch at a time so it can pre-select the next gear it makes transitions from one gear to another pretty seamless some of these dual clutch transmissions they don't shift all that great especially at lower speeds but this acura one pretty well bulletproof too i've yet to have one breakdown on any of my customers cars but here's a warning if you're gonna buy one of these or any honda product really i'm servicing the transmission on this uses a very special fluid the acura atf type 2.0 and yeah it costs like twelve dollars a quart presently but you don't want to go out and buy six dollar fluid buy the twelve dollar a quart fluid when you change the fluid out in these things now as you can see it's got a reasonable trunk joe it goes back even the back seats are comfy but it's the driving experience that really makes this car this car is a dream to drive got plenty of acceleration with the 200 horsepowers pulling the small car and it handles quite precisely now if you judge it by its size you can realize that it evolved out of the honda civic but it was really acura's first compact luxury sedan now let's say you were thinking about getting the honda civic type r the racing one those things now start at like 37 000 and are hard to find these acura ilses start at 26 000 and you get a lot of the fun sure you don't have much horsepower but they're still very quick vehicles and acura's got a better image than honda when it comes to luxury cars really it's all honda anyways they make hondas and acuras they share so much technology that this thing for its price it's actually quite a bargain my customer gets 36 miles a gallon on this thing on a highway with a little bitty four-cylinder engine made it up to that eight-speed clutch transmission and it gets about 25 in town nice luxury car that gets good gas merge for that kind of performance and really since they're based on honda civics they have a history of long-term reliability with minimum repairs required and set up all black like this one they really have a nice conservative interior with uber comfortable seats and paddle shifters that actually work they don't have all that lag that some of the european ones do and certainly not all the lag that a lot of the american dual clutch transmissions have that feel like they're slipping and sliding they're not precise at all and if you want to be just conservative hey just put it in drive and it'll do all the work for you you just got to twirl the wheel around it'll do all the shifting it's plenty quick enough just putting it in automatic and of course for you tech files it's got all the remote controls on a steering column cruise control and everything so you can play around with that and not take your eyes off the road and really being a honda product if you do want to soup things up even further racing suspension there's all kinds of after-market stuff you can do on honda products hey these are civic based there is so much aftermarket stuff for civics just think of this as a higher-end civic that you can soup up even more honda really hit the nail on the head with this eight speed dual clutch transmissions i haven't seen any fail they shift like a dream and they just keep going on forever it's just a bunch of incremental improvements honda engineers have been working on these things for a long time and they don't just say oh that didn't work we'll throw that away and start with something new they just keep improving things compare the looks of this car with an early civic you can see they've really gone a long way okay everybody knows honda civics are well made cars but like everything else do they make them as good as they used to be are they worse are they better or is a bit more complex than that now of course these cost a lot more than early civic they bought this for 25 3. i remember when you buy for 2500 showed my age now i do have to say they're beautiful cars now look at the original civic that actually listed for 21.50 it was an ugly car this is not an ugly car that's strangely enough guess where they're built jolly old england there it is uk don't go saying oh my god it's an english honda the english mech junk i never buy one of those look they're just putting them together there the engines and everything they're still coming from japan they're just putting them together and understand one thing most formula one race cars are engineered and designed in england too decent technology for building things they just don't have the money in the infrastructure to do the whole thing the parts come from japan but they're put together in england and as you can see this is not like a tesla this is a uniform gap we follow it around and the other side it's also a uniform gap and he cares about quality this isn't tesla trying to scam everybody and make him jump they make solid reliable cars of course under the hood there's modern technology it's a four cylinder engine and unlike the old ones it's got a timing chain not a belt that in and of itself is a better idea you don't have to mess with the rubber timing belts i saw a 2020 honda odyssey the other day it still had a rubber timing belt on it who knows with that but this is a timing chain better designed than the older ones but now here comes the quandary honda makes more internal combustion engines than any other company in the world every year but this is a 1.5 liter honda seems to have fixed their oil dilution problem with their software and the new gf6 oil but still you're not going to get the same life span we won't know for years to see how long these last but from my experience with hondas they had turbocharged engines for ages i've seen them still going pretty strong with 200 000 miles on them you get power and gas mileage they are still like cars so 37.4 miles per gallon is something that's as zippy as this thing not a bad deal and just like toyota honda makes all their own automatic transmissions and they do a pretty good job because i had a customer in houston they had a 2010 civic automatic and he burned the transmission out the older ones a little bit weak the new ones no so in this case the transmission as complex as it may be is probably a lot better built than the older ones were and of course they're all modern inside yeah they're beautiful looking cars and unlike the early civics they actually have leg room and being a hatch of course they're handy you got room decent drop the seats you got a whole bunch of room i'd say from the front seat to the back here it's about as much room as the entire n600 honda that i bought in 1970 that i'm gonna try to get running again so they're a lot bigger than they used to be inside and of course outside there's still an easy car to park and drive let's take it for a spin now it's a hondas of course star trek up the ac works perfectly fine and you can see he hasn't even taken a plastic cover off the screen yet no shaking it does have electronic stuff like the old ones did an electric parking brake electric brake hold no that's electronic crap i really don't care about but that's the way there are these days so you got to live with that i'd rather have a mechanical emergency brake it's going to last forever and never break you can see it's got a real wide back up camera you get a really good view and it's very crisp now you're in a civic so you're relatively low to the ground but not too low they are fun to drive in the twisties they're lower down and this is the sport so it's got a little better suspension system on it for ride there's no problem taking curves it just follows you through doesn't oversteer doesn't understeer and even though i got the air conditioning on it's still a pretty quiet car it's not the little rust bucket early civics that rusted out clanged at every turn rode like a washing machine no it's a completely different vehicle to that that's the technology in here alone you can understand fun for taking a drive out in the woods and now we're gonna see what it does in a straight line so we'll slow down here and we'll let that guy get way ahead of us as long as there's nobody behind us wait a little while longer starts out slow but once that vtec kicks in smooth seamless shifting decent amount of zip we're going 70 in no time at all and it's got very responsive steering this is an old country road that goes all over the place hey it's got no problem you want to do a little zigzagging these are fun to play around with yep for such a small car it still rides pretty good a lot better than the older ones so is the handling now of course it has all those modern things like lane departure that tells you when you get out of your lane we'll see if we get to work well that didn't work too good i really departed the lane and the warning didn't come out so so much for their lean departure system that's why i don't trust these things don't think these lane departure blah blah blah it's gonna save you they won't you gotta use your eyes you gotta look in the mirror we'll try it again here okay look i went outside the lane and it didn't put anything on let's follow it a little and then pull over slightly just to see if we go real slow okay there it says we departed the lane but i had to do it extremely slowly to make that light come out so don't bet your life on these systems unless you're a really slow driver you still gotta watch what you're doing these are zippy cars they handle responsibly learn how to drive it don't depend on some kind of crazy safety system that may or may not work now granted this is a brand new honda civic with some new designs on it but going by the history of honda i'd say it'd be a very reliable vehicle but as will it go three four hundred thousand pretty trouble three mileage like an old honda civic dead only time's gonna tell that one but the overall drivability comfort ride is infinitely superior to the older civics and of course it's not an ugly duckling like the early ones it's a beautiful looking car especially the sport version that's put together in england and sure speed burners are going to say i want a civic type r to race around it they cost a lot they're really fast but they ride like iron buckets if i had a choice and i was driving from tennessee to california and back i take the civic sport long before a civic type r because it rides nice and smooth and it's plenty fast enough for driving on interstates i would not want a civic type r to drive thousands of miles in i think my back would give out they're still solid made there's no arguing that you're getting an awful lot of technology but honda makes good engines and transmissions 25 grand what kind of funny you're gonna have on a modern car 25 grand the average car is 36 to 40 thousand dollars these days and this is certainly more than your average everyday civic why you should buy a lexus but strangely enough i'm gonna start with why you shouldn't buy a lexus and that's because they cost too much money i'm cheap i would have never bought one in the past but i got this one for my wife years ago one of my customers got it from his father they were tired of it and i gave him three thousand dollars for the car even though it only had 60 000 miles on it yeah it was like 12 years old but i don't care i know these things can last so when it was new in 2002 it was a 34 000 car so basically i paid less than one tenth of the original price for a vehicle that i've had customers yes 300 that had 400 000 miles on it with 60 000 miles 80 percent of its lifespan left i would never buy a new one regardless of the cost because i think they're ugly i like the old style front those new one with those giant scowling mouth plastic front ends i think that's one of the ugliest designs ever and sure a lot of cars are all copying out that big scowly front grill people think oh that's popular that's cool and they go out and they buy something they want it to look like that me i think it's ugly i like the old ones they're better looking face it do you want a big man in front of your car it just looks stupid now the reason i love this lexus is because hey i'm getting older these things are really comfortable and luxurious now this car is 18 years old but the seats the leather's still in really good shape it's amazing and being alexis things hardly ever break now in the interest of honesty yes i put lots of parts on this car but for a rather odd reason i use it as a test car to test out brakes rotors all kinds of car parts i tell them semi stuff for a 2002 es 300 i'll see if your products are any good and here's something that i found out that kind of surprised even me a couple years ago a company sent me brand new front struts for the suspension so i put them on this car and at the time the car was 16 years old with the original struts and lo and behold it rode much worse with the brand new struts now they weren't original equipment struts they were aftermarket ones but it rode so much worse with the new ones that i put the old ones back on so here we're talking about a car with 16 year old struts that still rode fine the new aftermarket ones rode worse than these old ones they can last that long that tells me they're building these things right check inside the door made in japan there's just something about serious japanese car manufacturers and motorcycle manufacturers for that matter they take it seriously they keep building the car quality you don't see that with cars that are built in lots of other countries no it's not a race car it's got plenty enough horsepower with the v6 you could cruise all day long when we drove to big bend the speed limit was like 85 miles an hour we did 90 of the whole way on cruise control didn't skip a beat it's got the proven acen transmission i changed the fluid a couple of times that's it still shifts like a dream and sure upgraded the headlights they look cooler but that's the advantage of a platform like this a lot of the parts that are newer style will fit on the older ones especially aftermarket ones so you can upgrade it if you want hey i'd rather buy 250 worth of headlights than buy a brand new lexus for what forty five fifty thousand dollars these days and up and even though it still kind of looks and runs like a new car the insurance on it is dirt cheap it's an 18 year old car i only got to pay like 500 bucks a year insurance on this thing check out the insurance on a new car if it gets wrecked or stolen and it's a 60 dollar car they gotta put the sixty thousand dollar payout don't think your insurance is gonna be cheap on that they got big giant trunks with lots of space but really the main selling point is luxury and they can last so long many luxury cars hey they fall apart they want you to buy a new one every four or five years these things weren't made that way take the engine it's naturally aspirated doesn't have a supercharger doesn't have a turbo charger isn't gdi high pressure injector it's the plain old v6 fuel injected engine like in a corolla or in a toyota pickups they're known for reliability they can last a long time you have to do anything to them but change the oil i'm a fan of the v6 ones i'm not really a fan of the big v8 ones yeah they're a bit more luxurious but as they age those engines are more expensive to work on they're much harder to work on give you an idea you've got a v8 engine in order to change the starter on the later model ones you got to pull the intake manifold off you're going to spend over a thousand bucks changing the starter i changed the starter out in this thing i think it took me 15 minutes yeah stocks are going to wear out on any car but guess what i went to autozone and bought the starter been in there for six years worked perfectly fine the advantage of this is a lot of it is just toyota camry parts a lot of them are totally interchangeable and there's a big aftermarket forum so you can do what you want without having to spend a fortune at the lexus dealer on their outrageously overpriced parts and look even when they're dirty i've watched this thing in two weeks they still look good of course a lot of that depends on the color that you get in a car if you're gonna get a black car it's gonna look dirty in two hours anyways but if you get a color like this it doesn't show dirt all that bad so you don't have to wash it as much and like i said the quality is just there take these leather seats the previous luxury car that my wife had was an old toyota cressida and those seats got so cracked it looked like the grand canyon inside so i covered them with these great new zealand pure wool seat covers that were like 250 bucks a piece but one day my wife said i know something's weird in my car so i took those new zealand sheepskin covers off and inside those crescent or cracked leather seats believe it or not there was a colony of ants with eggs and everything when i pulled it off they scrambled and ran all over the place i don't know what the heck they're doing on a mobile car that's driving around but an entire colony of ants made inside the leather seats were just not made that well then but hey these are 18 years old and they still look great that's just what i call quality now i know some people are saying oh scotty how much did lexis pay you to see how great their cars are well i don't think they paid me anything considering that i said i would never buy a brand new one because i think those grills are as ugly as can be i'm telling you a real life experience from myself and my many customers that have owned these things and i'd never shell out for a new one heck that kind of money i'd rather send my grandkids to college then waste it on a car but if you want luxury in a car that is going to last a really long time and hardly ever break down and not be all that expensive to maintain either i mean you don't go to the dealer just find a regular mechanic like me that works on it to take care of the thing stay away from hybrid lexuses my customs with hybrid lexus they loved them when they were new but then when they got 10 years or older and started to break down man the parts cost a fortune for them because there's really no aftermarket for that hybrid stuff you're talking dealer then but if you're looking for a nice reliable long-lasting luxury car hey get yourself a lexus that's got a v6 engine in it is a 2001 4 runner i'm going to give you a total analysis of this vehicle so you can make the correct choice for yourself now of course the 4 runners just started out as a pickup truck you can still see a little bit left in it and then they became very popular suvs now the main problem that i see people having with buying a huge forerunner is people say they want too much money for they're just too expensive but then expenses in the eye of the beholder this guy bought this thing when it only had 19 000 miles on it and 2002 was a used vehicle and as we can see as we go inside now this baby has 386 000 miles on it and take a listen to the engine as we start it up star tread up even though it's cold we'll put it in drive doesn't shake at all smooth as can be if you put a blindfold on me i couldn't tell you if this was a new truck or an old truck that's how well built these things are now granted this one was made in japan but it certainly was well made in japan for people who are wondering what to buy personally for all round vehicle this setup is the best as we look under the back we can see its classic rear wheel drive big old axle in the back rear wheel drive and check this out the frame solid as can be the only rusty part hey that's the add-on tow hitch the original stuff is still solid it's the add-on one that was made as well as the toyota product that's got rust but that's just the covering and it's superficial that's still real solid metal it's nothing to worry about it's just cosmetic and really unless you spend your life crawling under your vehicle do you really care what it looks like under there as you look under the front it is not a front-wheel drive vehicle you can see there's no axle coming in the front i'll shift the other side so you can get a better view there you can see there's no axle in there although you can see there's a hole there they can build them you can add it on if you really want to go through a lot of use but really most people they don't really need all-wheel drive it's a good stable vehicle with rear rear-wheel drive unless you're one of those off-roaders you live out in a mud hut somewhere with potholes and mud road these are perfectly fine the majority of my customers with them never take them off the street so you're really kind of throwing your money away going all-wheel four-wheel drive and unless you live in a big snow belt and you're worried about that then go right ahead you'll find that these plane rear wheel drive ones will cover most situations you're going to get into and of course realize less is better if you're not going to use it don't buy it they cost more you get worse gas mileage two wheel drive ones are perfectly fine now since all the four runners are made in japan yeah they're not going to be cheap costs money to make good vehicles in japan 300 something thousand miles on this listen to the engine check it out now this idle down a little solid engine still really quiet the exhaust sounds perfect now you might say oh it's smoking oh yeah it's cold out today that's condensation it's going to smoke when you start when it's cold outside people smoke too when it's cold and some people say look water's coming out something's wrong no in this case absolutely nothing's wrong when you burn gasoline which is basically carbon and hydrogen one of the byproducts is h2o water vapor all cars will give a certain amount of water off when you start them out first because they're letting water out plus they have metal exhaust systems when they cool down they have a tendency of absorbing water vapor when they heat the water's going to come out somewhere so that's normal this thing doesn't lose coolant doesn't have a blowing head gasket you're going to see that on any car and you're going to see the smoke when it's cold outside because it's cold and the combination of the water vapor inside the exhaust and hot exhaust you're gonna see smoke now if you want a solid vehicle these four runners are for you they're still made with solid frames so they're unlike any other suv practically out there they're still on a solid frame now the six cylinder engine puts out 183 horsepower it's not a racing machine but it wasn't designed for that it's a nice truck frame very solid reliable vehicle 380 000 miles whatever this thing has it's a lot of miles to have it still running as good as it's running now the newer scores have a little bit more horsepower but they're never meant to be speed demons they're for reliability and you can still tow stuff this thing could tow up to 5 000 pounds it's a basically truck turned into an suv and they kept it old style and me i like old style reliability solid frames never going to come apart these are vehicles that you could drive forever if you wanted to if eventually the engine or transmission wears out you can replace them they sold so many of them if you're like me you go to a junkyard buy a salvage one you can get rebuilt once you can do whatever you want they do have a tendency of lasting so long that you really don't have to do much to them at all in most cases except change the oil and the only bad thing that ever happened to this was he took it to a toyota dealer for oil change and they wrecked the car but they paid for the damage and fixed it all back up again and that was years ago and still going perfectly fine and that hilarious story just follows my philosophy entirely hey learn to change your own oil doing your driveway make sure it was done right you got the right oil in it and you don't have some young kid or real lead foot mechanic driving it around and smashing it up and i mean look at the quality of it it's old it's got a ton of miles the pain in the finish is still in excellent shape the japanese care and sure if you look here you can see a little fading but that's not even the car's fault somebody left something square out here in the rain you could buff it out if you really wanted to so let's take it for a ride see how it goes away we go nice stable handling now this does bounce a little i'll give you that it's got the case of the bouncies but i already knew that because i checked on the front struts are leaking they're all leaked out hey you know 380 something thousand miles you expect to put struts on eventually now you notice you're plenty high enough in the air here you got lots of clearance yeah it's still stable doesn't feel like it's going to tip over like a cheaper mate suv does with too much body roll now as i said it's no race car he will take off from a stop i mean it accelerates it's nothing rocketing about it but you hear how smooth that transmission still shifts it still shifts like a dream with all this mileage as all that this thing is i would have no qualms jumping in it turning the keys and driving the thing from tennessee to california back at least after i put struts back on it new ones i'd like to have a little bit better handling if i'm driving all the way to california and when you're just cruising around hey it's reasonably quiet you let's face it it's based on a truck chassis but it's reasonably quiet vehicle ride's quiet the engine's quiet it's just a big heavy nice riding full-frame suv now if you don't believe my analysis let's see what the computer has to say you can't hide from the computer data blah blah blah we'll see what comes up and we'll start the diagnosis all right it does good the only code it has is the abs system those things often break when the cars aren't that old see 12 24 that there's no signal open or short now that code means that the right rear wheel speed sensor isn't giving anything out so it's probably gone bad a lot of guys will live without it yeah when they get this old the abs doesn't work all that great anyway so it just reverts to non-abs normal braking and this thing seems pretty fine to me driving it around and stopping i have no problems it doesn't pull it stops nice and fast doesn't have any problems now since that was the only code let's check live data that gives you some really good idea what kind of shape the vehicle is in and here we go we'll go through the data now for a car with that kind of gas mileage the long-term fuel trim is only 0.82 some of them must see 15 or 20 that's hardly anything it's subtracting just a tiny bit of fuel and the short-term fuel trim it's adding 2.3 that's kind of remarkable considering how old this vehicle is i mean look at the field trim 99.15 almost 100 percent pretty good for something with 380 000 miles on it and if you remember from my other videos if any of this data's orange there's a problem i don't see any orange yet we look at the misfire counts zero across the board one through six i don't feel any and the computer just says yes here we go again total fuel trim two that's out of one so it's almost perfect i gotta say this whole four runner is in better shape than i am sure i'm 67 i'm older than it is but it does have 386 000 miles on it i don't know how many miles i have on me though the odometer broke a long time ago so now you know the truth about toyota 4runners and why even though this is a 2001 with 386 000 miles it's still an excellent vehicle and in most cases if somebody's trying to sell you a vehicle with 386 000 miles people are going to say you must be out of your mind to buy a vehicle with that kind of mileage in this case if you got a good enough price you'd be out of your mind not to buy it 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: 1,416,683

Keywords: auto, auto repair, car, car diy, car repair, cars, diy, how to, mechanic, repair, scotty kilmer, car review, best and worst car brands, best car brands, best car brands to buy, best cars, car advice, car brand, car brands, car brands tier list, i ranked all car brands from worst to best, least reliable cars, most reliable cars, reliable cars, top 10, worst car brands, worst cars, asian, asia, asian cars, asian car brands, toyota, honda, mazda, kia, hyundai, worst to best, acura

Id: mdwdDpcJcws

Length: 50min 50sec (3050 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 11 2021