Ugh I don’t miss those days. I remember when the torsion bar broke on my 94 Toyota pickup. Had to replace everything as it was all rotted and had to be torched off in rusty pieces. Tacoma was rotted oil pan, differential, shocks leaf springs etc. etc. and that was after the frame recall was done and the truck was reundercoated.

 

Youtube kindly served me up a video about cam sprocket wear issues with 3rd gen 3.0 TDi engines. Doing the timing chains is costly enough, but the cam sprockets can't be replaced by themselves, you have to buy a complete unit of sprockets, cams and caps, which cost about $US5,000, and the whole job takes about a week. Throw in about $US1,700 worth of gaskets etc too.

The issue arises because each bank's cams are driven by a timing sprocket, which gear-drives one of the cam sprockets, which gear-drives the other cam sprocket. The teeth wear down over time due to insufficient oiling (Audi trying to reduce fuel usage to meet Euro standards) and the fix recommended in the video is to get a remap to up the oil pressure.

The whole video makes me think we might just do an LS swap if/when our engine has a catastrophic failure due to teeth shearing off and grenading the engine. So that's something to look forward to.

 

I wonder how difficult a job that would be. Mating up the electronics as well as all the mechanical parts, although you could use a gm transmission also or they probably sell adapters for most applications to mate the LS to different transmissions. I’m seeing more and more people doing swaps with the Hemi motors from the 90’s too pulling them out of trucks.

 

Me neither! Living in the KC area now. At about 250,000 miles the 4 runner had a bad suspension bushing (yep just one lol) and I just did the whole front end while at it. Got loaded arms, new bolts, balljoints, etc and then used a diablo blade on the sawzall and cut out the old stuff I knew right off the bat that trying to remove all adjusters and bolts would be a nightmare. I have hardly ever had to do anything to it so anything underneath I know will be hard to take apart without cutting. Still purrs like a kitten and uses about 1/2 qt of oil between 5000 mile change intervals!

 

Nice, one thing about my Toyota’s I don’t think I ever had to add any oil ( but my mileage was a lot lower than yours) and never touched the transmission or transfer case on either one and had zero issues. Between the two of them the only mechanical thing I had go bad was the starter on the 94 all the problems I had were from things rusting not mechanical failure.

 

Yeah all of ours have been reliable as hell. My Scion tC uses some oil but overall has not let me down. The 13 Tacoma we have has also been super reliable and uses practically no oil. I did have to replace a MAF on it at about 190,000 miles. But would trust that thing to take us anywhere. My wife really wanted a Tacoma for the 4Runner replacement, so I bought it for her and we kept the 4Runner. The Tacoma is also what I use to haul the S2k to the track and back. I am pretty hooked on the Toyotas I have!

 

Handily the Q7 uses the ZF 8HP transmission (rated to 738lbft), which is in approximately 172% of all new vehicles built today, and Google tells me there's a number of adapters available. I think the biggest issue would be getting the virtual gauge cluster to play ball. I suppose one could always go old school with a bunch of Autometer gauges crammed into the binnacle/mounted to the hood.

 

You could check out www.dakotadigital.com

 

My mechanic, Ramon, always told me that he'd change it for me and then sell the timing belt on eBay. He works on NSXs for a living and said it didn't need to be changed. The temperatures where I have the car never freeze or get to hot. But, yeah, this time when I called him about it he said it was time due to age.


^3-26-2010. Ramon working on my car.



Yes, I agree. I paid $65,000 for it in 2009 and it's worth around $170,000 now. I recently got it a Hagerty insurance policy. It's my favorite car to look at.



^7-12-2009. My first road trip with it was to Colorado. I didn't move to CO for 8 years. I have an acrylic print of this on the wall in front of my pc.

 

It would probably be my favorite to drive as well.