Toyota Reviews

The first piece of advice here is to not drive the car at all until this problem is fixed. A car with faulty brakes is one of the most dangerous situations you can find yourself in, and it’s just not safe to even attempt to move it, even to relocate it on the driveway. The problem could get a lot worse very quickly, leaving you with no brakes at all. And even if it doesn’t get any worse, your limited braking capacity could make an emergency situation much, much worse.

The noise is probably not brake-line pressure escaping, since you don’t have falling brake fluid levels. At which point, my suspicion becomes that the brake master cylinder is at fault. This is a device that uses vacuum from the engine to assist you to push the brake pedal. If the diaphragm inside the booster fails, you will might hear the vacuum escaping, with a hissing noise. Even if the booster is intact internally, a simple hose that connects the booster to the engine could have split and caused the leak. Until it’s fixed, though, you won’t have full braking power and that’s, obviously, very dangerous.

If you want a very capable off-road vehicle with a good reputation for reliability, then the answer is probably yes. These were great vehicles and were actually phenomenal in the bush where it took a lot to stop them.

The better question is probably why you wouldn’t buy one, and in that case, the answers include high fuel consumption (the FJ Cruiser was only available with a petrol engine, not a diesel). The vehicle was also a bit on the small side inside and won’t hold all the gear a typical family would need for a week away camping. Also, the two-and-a-bit door layout means access to the rear seat is a bit limited.

There’s also the matter of not buying more vehicle than you need and, if you’re not planning to go off-road or outback touring, then the FJ Cruiser is overkill. They’re also getting a bit long in the tooth these days, but a well maintained example can still be ultra-reliable.

The usual procedure for flushing a cooling system is to drop the existing coolant (usually by disconnecting the bottom radiator hose) fill the system with distilled water and whatever flushing chemical the workshop uses, restart the engine, drive it around for a short time until everything is at operating temperature, dump the water and flush mixture and refill the cooling system with the proper coolant.

You can also simply flush the radiator (and not the rest of the cooling system) by disconnecting the radiator hoses and running a hose through the radiator, usually in the opposite direction the coolant flows. But this is a much more simplistic flush and doesn’t change the condition of the engine crankcase’s cooling passages.

It’s possible that the flushing process has loosened some rust or scale that then blocked the cooling system somewhere else (the thermostat is a prime suspect) and if that’s the case, the process needs to be repeated until the water coming out of the cooling system is nice and clean and not tainted with rust or scale or anything else.

Revving the engine to get the flushing mixture to do its job is not really a problem, but could also be achieved by actually driving the vehicle (which would also get it up to temperature faster). But, really, provided the temperature gauge hasn’t been allowed to move into the red zone, you shouldn’t have damaged anything. But you do need to know why the operating temperature of the engine is now higher after a cooling system flush.