Toyota Land Cruiser Problems

On this series of LandCruiser, the fuse box you need to access is behind a plastic panel just to the side of the steering column, low down on the lower edge of the dashboard. Once you’ve removed the cover, there should be a legend printed on the inside of it that tells you which fuse is which. The fuse you need to check is fuse number 2 which controls all those circuits as well as the number-plate light, the glovebox light and the car’s clock. The replacement fuse you need is a 15Amp of the blade type.

If the fuse continues to blow, then you need to start looking for a short-circuit or other wiring problem that is forcing the fuse to blow to protect the vehicle’s wiring.

If the engine power has returned since this episode, I’d be willing to suggest that what happened is that the vehicle had gone into limp-home mode. This happens when something like the transmission or engine becomes hot enough that to continue at normal pace might cause damage to the vehicle. It’s the car’s way of saving its own life, if you like. When it does, you can expect a warning light and a reduction in power, just as you experienced.

Towing a caravan up hills is a great way to get a transmission really hot, or even a turbocharged engine such as the one in your LandCruiser. If the vehicle returned to normal once it had cooled down, then you shouldn’t have any ongoing problems, but another oil change and perhaps transmission service might be a good idea as these fluids can lose their mojo once they’ve been really hot even once.

Torque converters have been known to seize and, if that’s the case, it could stall the engine because there’s no slip to allow the engine to idle while the car is stationary. You need to have this checked by a transmission specialist who may have seen this very thing before. Either way, the vehicle won’t be going anywhere under its own power.

Even if the gearbox itself had frozen solid, the torque converter should still allow enough slip to let the engine idle. So that’s definitely where to start the investigation.

I'd start with my local Toyota dealer. Chances are it will have a copy of the relevant DVD in its archives, just as it would have copies of technical manuals for vehicles going way back into Toyota's past. Whether or not you'll be able to make yourself a copy of the DVD is another matter, but it can't hurt to ask.

Failing that, check out your local Toyota or four-wheel-drive club whose members might have the DVD and will be happy for you to copy it. Whether that's a copyright breach, though, might be worth looking into.

If none of those options are available, I've seen the DVD in question advertised online. It isn't cheap, though, at $200 or $300. Perhaps there are websites out there that can download a copy of the files which you can burn to a DVD for a fee.

This is actually more common than you think and affects lots of different makes and models. Service station fuel pumps are designed to shut off once the tank is full (to avoid over-filling by the customer). They do that by detecting any splash-back up, or pressure build-up in, the throat of the fuel filler. In most cases, this splash-back or pressure wave is caused by the fuel level being so full, the fuel being pumped in has nowhere else to go. And so the fuel pump shuts off.

But for some reason, some cars are just harder to fill with some pumps than others. Whether it’s the path the filler neck takes to the tank to even the pressure produced by the fuel pump, it’s just one of those things, apparently.

The best way to get around it (and avoid having the fuel pump click off annoyingly 20 times every fill-up) is to be a bit tactical with the pump nozzle. Instead of pushing it all the way into the filler neck, withdraw it slightly. The other technique is to twist the fuel nozzle, say, 90 degrees so that it sprays directly on to a different part of the filler neck. The other thing you can try is to not pull the trigger on the fuel pump all the way. By modulating the trigger slightly, you might find that the fuel now enters the filler neck at a rate more agreeable to the pump.

Coolant leaks can be very tricky things, often starting at one point and then running down a hose, bracket or wire to drop on the ground where you’re not looking for them. If you definitely can’t find a leak, however, you need to start looking for another problem which could even be a leaking head gasket which is allowing the coolant to enter the engine’s cylinders.

The first thing I’d do, however, is change the radiator hoses., If they’re flattening out when the engine is running, that suggests they’ve collapsed internally and are unable to cope with the suction created by the engine’s water pump (which circulates the coolant around the engine). Even if the hoses look fine, they can be damaged inside and, left this way, can cause a blockage in the cooling system which can lead to the engine overheating. Perhaps this is already happening, and allowing the boiling coolant to escape the system via the pressurised radiator cap or the overflow system.

This type of thing is certainly not an uncommon fault, but whether it’s more common in Toyotas is another question altogether. Certainly, Toyota has not recalled the vehicle to fix this problem, nor am I aware of a service bulletin (much more likely than a safety recall for a dud head unit).

But the good news is that there are specialist companies out there that fix problems like this one. You remove your head unit, send it away and it returns fully functioning and tested, ready to reinstall. Flickering and dropping out are both common faults in modern head units, but both can be fixed by the right specialist.

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.

The Toyota LandCruiser is one of those vehicles that defies conventional wisdom by being super long-lived. It kind of depends on which model LandCruiser you’re talking about, but if it’s a diesel-engined version, there’s every chance that it still has lots of life left in it at 320,000km.

That presumes, of course, that it has been serviced correctly and has not been used to drag an excavator on a trailer at 110km/h every day of its life. Any vehicle with this many kilometres needs a very careful pre-purchase inspection but, being a LandCruiser, the cost of this inspection is warranted where it may not be on many other makes and models.