Toyota Problems

This hasn’t surfaced as a common problem, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening in some instances. The HiAce rear axle should have seals on the actual differential centre as well as each axle. If these are failing continuously, there are a number of possibilities.

The first is that there’s something bent or damaged that is placing undue force or damaging the seal, causing it to fail prematurely. The second is that the seal (and its replacements) are from a dud batch of seals with either poor manufacturing tolerances or a flaw in the material from which they’re made. The third culprit would be a blocked differential breather which is not allowing the pressure inside the housing escape, and that pressure is causing the oil to be pushed out past the seals.

The kerb weight of the RAV4 you mentioned depends on whether it’s the two or four-wheel-drive model. If it’s the former, the kerb weight is 1690kg, if it’s the all-wheel-drive model, the kerb weight is 1775kg. I know you asked for tare weight, but the only difference between kerb and tare weight sis that tare weight is the mass of the empty vehicle with 10 litres of fuel in its tank, while kerb weight is the same empty vehicle but with a full tank of fuel.

Of perhaps more interest to anybody towing is the fact that the two-wheel-drive RAV4 can tow 480kg while the AWD version can cope with 1500kg. The 2WD Rav’s GVM, meanwhile, is 2185kg and the AWD’s is 2230kg. The two-wheel-drive RAV4’s GCM is 2665kg, while the all-wheel-drive’s GCM is 3730kg.

Some of this information is quite difficult to find (even if you have the owner’s manual) yet it’s crucial safety information and should be more readily available. Some car makers seem very coy about publishing GVM and GCM limits, possibly because they don’t always reflect well on the product’s ability to tow and carry a load at the same time.

Even though this model Camry has an official combined fuel consumption figure of 7.9 litres per 100km, the exact number of kilometres you get from each tank of fuel will depend hugely on how and where you drive the car. If your driving is all around the city and suburbs, you might average, say, nine litres per 100km. If it’s all freeway work, then that figure may tumble to as low as seven litres per 100km. Drive the car really gently and you might even get that figure to drop into the sixes.

In any case, the (higher) city figure means the Camry’s 70-litre fuel tank should take you around 750km before you need to fill up. On the highway, meantime, the same 70 litres should carry you almost 1000km before you need to start looking for a petrol station. In reality, of course, the only direction with such projections is down, and every cold start, traffic jam and headwind will take kilometres off those figures.

There’s a very good chance that your problem concerns the cable or linkage that connects the gearstick in the cabin with the actual gearbox. It’s very common for one cable or linkage to operate half the gears, and a second linkage to operate the rest. If this linkage has fallen off or become detached somehow, there’s no longer a physical link between the gearstick and the transmission selectors for those gears. At which point, it’s impossible to select the affected gears.

A quick check under the gearbox will confirm whether this is the case, and fixing it should also be a simple case of reattaching the linkage or possibly replacing a broken cable.

It’s a tough one isn’t it? But in the first instance, the filter replacement could simply have been overlooked on the job card when the mechanic was allotted to your vehicle. That said, I certainly hope you took the vehicle back and pointed out that you’d been charged for something you didn’t get. From the dealer’s reaction at the point, you might get a reasonable idea of how seriously this was taken at management level.

As for proof of oil changes, there’s a couple of things you can do. You can ask to see the old oil before it’s poured into the recycling drum, or you could even ask for a photo to be taken of the differentials and transfer-cases with their drain plugs removed to prove that the old oil was at least removed.

In the past, some car owners have even resorted to placing secret marks on various fasteners to make sure they’ve been undone by the mechanic. The trouble with that starts when the mechanic spots the mark they weren’t supposed to see. That’s when the customer-mechanic war really escalates.

It’s probably quicker and simpler to tell you what passenger and SUV hybrids Toyota DOES sell in Australia (as well as reducing the chance of missing some obscure, foreign-market variant). So, right now, that list is made up of the Toyota Yaris Cross, C-HR, Corolla Cross, RAV4, Kluger, Yaris, Camry and Corolla (the latter in both hatch and sedan formats).

It’s a bit surprising to find you’re having trouble getting parts for a Prius C as this model was sold here by Toyota between 2012 and 2020. It was more or less replaced by the Yaris Hybrid, or at least that’s how many buyers saw it. Toyota has one of the biggest dealership networks in the country as well as plenty of dealers in regional areas, and that remains one of the brand’s strengths as far as servicing and parts supply goes. By the way, now that that all new cars sold in Australia are imported, nearly all spare parts beyond normal servicing items (filters, belts etc) will also be imported.

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.

This is a pretty well known problem with the three-litre turbo-diesel that Toyota was fitting to Prados between 2009 and 2014. The problem began when Toyota redesigned the pistons of the engine to help it achieve Euro 4 emissions standards. Earlier versions of the motor that didn’t comply with Euro 4 did not have the same problem.

The piston cracking most commonly occurs once the engine has covered something like 100,000km or 150,000km. It was also most likely to occur in engines that had been modified to produce more turbo-boost or vehicles that had been used for extended periods of towing heavy loads.

Toyota did issue a service bulletin for the problem and began fitting post-2014 engines with different fuel injectors and a revised piston design. Piston failures in these later engines are rarer but still not entirely unknown. Even though a service bulletin was issued, Toyota did not issue a recall for the affected vehicles.