Toyota Problems

Simply assuming the problem is a dud sensor is a great way to replace a bunch of things that weren’t causing the problem. This needs to be diagnosed and the first step there is to have the car electronically scanned to see what faults the computer already knows about. From there, you can make a much more informed plan of attack.

That said, you may well be right and the problem is a crank-angle sensor or something to do with the throttle position sensor. But, equally, the problem could be with the car’s wiring (getting hot when the power is turned on) or the fuel pump, so making a guess and replacing that component is a great way to waste time and money. A scan is quick and cheap and the smart way to go on any electronically fuel-injected vehicle.

That’s getting up there for any car, even though modern engines are capable of much greater distances than their older relatives. But that sort of mileage does raise some questions.

Those start with how complete is the service history. If there are any gaps, this would be a car to avoid, as any vehicle with that sort of distance covered will only be as good as its servicing and maintenance allow. The other question is what sort of life the car has led. Three hundred thousand kilometres sounds like a lot, but if you break it down to kilometres per year, it works out at less than 18,000km per annum, which is well within the bounds of normality.

However, the bottom line is this with all high-mileage vehicles: You might get lucky and get another 150,000 trouble-free kilometres out of the thing, or it might go bang tomorrow. That’s the punt you take and that’s why high-milers are cheap to buy. Which is another way of saying that even with a full service record, a RAV4 with that sort of mileage would still need to be cheap.

Plenty of used cars change hands without service books in the glovebox. But this is usually a problem in older cars where the vehicle is well and truly out of warranty. In a newer cars such as yours, the lack of any service history in the car would be a major red flag.

There’s no law requiring a car dealer to provide a service history, just as there’s no law compelling owners to have their cars serviced correctly, even though failing to do so will often void the car’s warranty. And how can a dealer be responsible for a car’s service books if the previous owner lost them? Also, if the car hasn’t been serviced within the Toyota dealership network, how can a dealership determine what that service history has been?

But here’s what’s probably happened: Many dealerships (especially high-volume ones) remove the service handbook, owner’s manual and the second key from the car before it goes on the lot. That’s to prevent those things going 'missing' over the weeks the car is on sale and being test driven by who-knows-who. In my experience, there will be one person at that car-yard who will know where the books and keys and stored and until you find that person, their location will remain a mystery. But, if the car was bought on the condition that the service books would be sent to you, then that forms part of the contract of sale and the car-yard must produce them. In the meantime, since you don’t know when the last service was carried out, I’d be pushing for a free service to ensure the car doesn’t wind up with a skipped service based on time and kilometres.

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.

This model Coaster bus was fitted with a 90-litre fuel tank. While that sounds like quite a bit, these vehicles are quite heavy (upwards of 2.5 tonnes) and are fitted with relatively thirsty diesel engines. As a result, you won’t be going more than about 500km between fill-ups, and that’s on the highway.

Add a trailer, roof rack or even drive into a headwind and fuel consumption can spike. But these vehicles have a great reputation for reliability and make great mobile-home conversion platforms.

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 driver’s window of the average car does a lot more work than any of the other power windows on board. What can happen over time is that the tracks the window glass runs in become clogged with dust and debris or simply go dry, meaning there’s excess friction when the glass is trying to change position. Thanks to gravity, this is usually most often seen when trying to raise the glass.

You can try a dry lubricant spray which typically contains graphite to grease the tracks slightly, but don’t overdo it. And try to avoid liquid lubricants as these will smear the glass. If that doesn’t work, you may have to take the door and glass apart to find the problem. It could also be that the electric motor that does the work of moving the glass is worn and not providing the necessary power.

In the meantime, you can help the motor by grabbing the top of the glass and using a little elbow grease to help it make the journey. Just make sure you don’t get your fingers in the way as the window shuts.

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.

On older cars like this one, some pretty strange electrical things can start to happen as switches and wiring ages. The first thing to check for is that there’s not a cargo area or interior light staying on when it shouldn’t and subsequently flattening the battery.

But the failure of the stereo and temperature gauge both point to a body computer problem (as does the battery going flat). The body computer basically controls all the car’s functions that are not driveline related. So, the central locking, lighting, entertainment, security, power windows, climate control and much, much more are body-computer driven. And if this computer fails, lights can turn themselves on, the central locking can cycle over and over again and various other electrical bits and pieces can switch themselves on and drain the battery.

But there’s one other check to make before blaming the computer (which, on a 1994 Corolla, won’t be as complex as one on a more modern car), which is to make sure there are no bad earths on the car. Failing gauges are a common symptom of a bad earth somewhere on the car, and if that’s the case, you might find this is also causing the starting problems by not allowing the battery to fully charge when the car is driven.

Both the Toyota and Kia have good reputations for quality and durability, while the Chery is more of an unknown quantity in Australia. The important thing to remember is that the cars you’ve short-listed are all near-new vehicles, so they’ll have plenty of factory warranty left to run.

The best way to avoid clear coat peeling is to buy a car in a solid, rather than metallic, colour, which doesn’t generally have the same peeling problems. That said, modern paint technology is much better than ever before, so this is less of a problem than it once was. Protecting a car’s interior means parking it out of the sun in the hotter months. Although, again, the durability of interior plastics has come a long, long way in recent years.

If you’re going to keep the car for a few years and then trade it in on a new car, retained value is more important than any of your other concerns. And in that sense, the Toyota traditionally moves to the front of the pack.