rev up your engines today I'm going to tell you the truth about Toyota oil
sludge problems and their engines and oil burning problems now sure Toyota
makes great cars but like any manufacturer they've had screw ups and
they had problems with boast oil sludge that led to engine damage and plain old
fashioned oil burning because the pistons and the piston rings were poorly
made and were not too fast now the first thing I to talk about is the oil sludge
problem engine oil after prolonged exposure to heat and the explosions and
chemical reactions inside an engine can break down and create sludge gunk now
when I was a young mechanic this was a big problem because they started out
with just plain old oil it had no detergent in it and so the
sludge at all going on bottom and clog everything up but for ages they've had
detergent oil and the purpose of the detergent is to keep all the crud in
suspension so instead of making sludge it flows through the system and stays in
the oil that you change when it's dirty now the Toyota oil sludge problem
occurred in some of the engines before 2003 building up too much sludge and I
personally have seen v6 Toyota engines go bad because of
this and in respect to this in 2007 Toyota Suttle a class-action lawsuit
they said that they would repair Toyota engines for free which if you ask me was kind
of sleazy deal because if you had a 97 that
was 10 years before this agreement so you wouldn't get anything out of a man
and the last one covered 2002 since that was 2007 basically you were only getting
three years more warranty honda thing got a raw deal if you ask me
how'd you can sear it covered a whole range of vehicles you can read them as
they go down here you can even look it up yourself if you want it covered quite
a few Toyota and Lexus vehicles and realizes in Toyotas behalf the vehicles
that people did complain about are less than 1% failure so it's not like they
all do it even if you bought a used one I've had many customers buy those used
ones on the list they had no problems consumption personally on the soil
sludge thing I think quite a bit had to do with the owners not properly
maintaining their cars in my own personal experience of customers cars
that I maintain correctly change the engine oil filter every 5,000
miles none of them had sludge problems now if you do have one of these engines
and you're worried go by the extreme service precaution like some of them
will say change it every five thousand miles, well me I
do mainly stop and go city driving so mine's always extreme I actually change
mine every 3,000 miles or once a year and usually it's once a year because I
don't even drive that anymore now the second problem I'm gonna talk about here
is Toyota engines and excessive oil consumptions now as they age all cars
are gonna burn somewhere even my old 94 Celica hey it burns a little bit well
but it's got 240,000 miles on it it burns about half a quart every 3,000
miles but I never added because I don't even drive 3000 thousand a year anymore
so I just changed the oil once a year and leave it at that
now since the Toyota engines are used to near perfection in their vehicles I've
seen them where yeah they'll burn a quart of oil maybe every thousand twelve
hundred miles their not like the Chrysler or mitsubishis that you see don't
burn two or three quarts of oil a week because their really worn but for a
Toyota even that's too much oil consumption now even I've had customers
that they're driving and when it's idling their oil pressure light comes on they
find out the oils too low you burn a quart of oil so every 1200 miles or so
and you go to the dealer and they say oh that's normal or GM's been saying that
for years it may be normal for a particular vehicle as it wears but it's
not normal for a well-built engine to use that much oil sure it's a minor pain in
the butt and oil every once a while but it's worse than that
because modern cars have catalytic converters oxygen sensors that's all on
the exhaust system and if you get a lot of oil burning the oil is going to burn
and that residue is gonna clog up the oxygen sensors it's gonna ruin the
catalytic converters and let's say you got a car that's got three catalytic
converters it can cost you two to three grand to have them all replaced not a
cheap fix so you really don't want an oil burning engine these days
it's not like the old days and early seventies a friend of mine got the
neighbors car for a dollar and they gave it to him for a dollar and that thing
went through a quart of oil every 50 miles was an old Ford so he just carried
four or five quarts all on a trunk and when he needed it he'd pour in the oil and
no catalytic converter a simple carburetor those things could run quite
some time the only thing you had to do was when the spark plugs would carbon up
and get all clogged now to fire you just take out the eight spark plugs and put
eight new ones in but modern cars there's so much more complex you really
can't drive them when they're burning oil especially that type of oil now for
this oil burning issue in 2011 Toyota issued this bulletin 2006 to 2011
Toyota's with the 2az-fe engine have excessive oil consumption and
may have misfire codes because of the oil consumption now that's a
four-cylinder engine you see a lot of them in a 4-cylinder Camrys but their
warranty again was kind of a sleazy one it wasn't a recall was a TSB a
technical service bulletins their thing was you could bring it in and they test
your engine and as you drive your car 1,200 miles and bring it back and it's
more than a quart low on oil then they decided they're gonna replace the
pistons and the piston rings on it this only lasted for 60 months or 60,000
miles the original factory warranty which is kind of a sleazy deal really
they wouldn't even do it on this whole thing that has 240,000 miles it only
burns half a quarter every 3,000 miles and they were saying it has to burn more
than a quart every 1,200 miles kind of a raw deal there again now I did
have customers that had piston rings and the Pistons replaced on ones that had
less than 60,000 miles and were less than 60 months old but I also have
customers that are still driving theirs and they burn oil and they burn a quart
every thousand or 800 miles toyota didn't fix it for them they say no
you're out of the period I recently had a customer of mine bring one in to
service and she said it's making this noise when I started up and it goes away
so I checked the engine oil and there was nothing on a dipstick and when I
changed that only half a quart of oil came out instead of 4 quarts the only
have a quarter oil after she said oh well you know I just had the oil change
in June which was July August September October four months ago so she thought
it was good I said no you got an older car now well past any other warranty
period I said you gotta check the oil every once in a while for burning oil
she's lucky it didn't destroy the engine so if you had one of these vehicles that's
got a lot of mileage you want to check your oil every once in a while put it in as
it goes out and here's a list of the engines
that are covered on the top and then on the bottom and like I said Toyota on
these piston and piston ring engines decide that they'll replace them for
five years or 60,000 miles the original factory warranty but that's kind of raw
deal they're pretty much admitting they weren't built correctly and they're not
standing behind them all they should say hey you want one of these things we'll
replace some free regardless that's something they should have done but I
guess due to the millions of cars they made with these engine they don't want
to give away billions of dollars fixing them for free just saying well it's
under the factory warranty because legally that's all they have to do now
in the past I used to tell people when they ask about car warranties I said
don't worry about the car warranty itself worry about whether it's built or
not go buy a Toyota then since they don't break you don't care about the
warranty well in this case you do after worried about the warranty on those
engines now they don't make those particular engines anymore new ones
haven't had any problems with excessive oil consumption they redesigned them
and they built them better but they did make mistakes done and although they made it
a little bit there too admission was hey yeah we kind of screwed up and we'll fix
them for 60,000 miles after that it's your buck that's going to pay for it and
really there they did a miss service to their owners I mean my son has a 2007 Camry
and yes it burns oil Toyota refused to fix it
for free because it had too many miles on it it's got less than half of what my
Celica has what would your I have an old one like this that burns half a quart
every 3,000 miles or one that today is burning about a quart of oil every 900
miles so now you know the truth about Toyota oil sludge and oil consumption
and especially if you're looking at a used toyota check out that list
don't buy it used or take it to a mechanic to do a wet and dry compression
test to see if the engine was still in tip-top shape or whether it's an oil
burner and you're not gonna buy that one used 2007 211 Toyota Camry Hybrid 2007
to 2009 Toyota Camry 2009 Toyota Corolla 2009 Toyota Matrix 2006 to 2008 toyota
rav4 2007 to 2008 Toyota Solara 2007 to 2009 Scion tC and 2008 to 2009 Scion xB
of course if you're do yourself type of guy since most of my 4-cylinder engines
just take out all the spark plugs and look at them and if they've got carbon
buildup on the spark plug tips and it's all black don't buy the car it's that simple
so if you never want to miss another one of my new car repair videos, remember to
ring that Bell