Tacomas rank worst in reliability of mid size trucks.

Not sure how much I will believe this article, I don’t own any of the others, but I have to say that my 2020 TRD OR is the worst pickup I have owned, even the worst off road vehicle I have owned, as for being in the shop and having the dealership working on it. Heck my 2013 Jeep JKUR had one recall and only had two visit to a dealer.

This Tacoma has been in the shop 9 times for problems, once 7 codes was pulled while on a trip and that dealer replicated the problem, couldn’t get the part needed and Toyota did nothing because my local dealer couldn’t duplicate it. Got lucky and that problem hasn’t shown back up, but always in my mine, especially when I am off the grid. It took 2.5 years and multiple trips to the dealer (each trip is 50 miles one way) for Toyota to fix my elapsed time problem even though it was documented from day one. It took 8 months of dealing with Toyota doesntCare after the TSB came out because I was over 36k miles. My dash lights do not light up unless I have the lights on, told not to worry about it even though the manual says they should dim when the lights are turned on, really hard to read at times, so I run with the running lights all the time.

The suspension was sagging .5” in front and 2.5” at the rear at 19k miles compared to a new truck on the lot, the dealer said that was normal. So it got a new suspension, Ironman foam cell 3” lift.

This is the 9 Toyota pickup I have owned, 87 turbo 4x4 (N), 90 xtra cab 4x4(N), 89 xtra cab 4x4, 94 xtra cab 4x4(N), 87 long bed, 2000 xtra cab 4x4(N)(the best one), 2002 double cab supercharged(N), 87 xtra cab and my current 2020(N).

I am lucky that my friend was a Toyota master mechanic, so I talk with him about problems and he fixes it for me. Knock on wood and so after getting these issues fixed, the truck runs great. Next month it will get the transmission fluid changed and a transmission oil cooler added, because it didn’t come with it, even though it has the 4 & 7 pin harness and a tow hitch and trailer brake hookup.

Overall it’s not a bad truck, I will keep it and upgrade as I go along. I do enjoy driving it.

 

Any other make and people here would call it a lemon.

 

I came close, but the new Nissan wasn’t out yet, couldn’t get the color I wanted in a Ranger and just didn’t want the Chevy. I started looking again for a really nice 1st gen Tacoma, but it was Covid and the prices were stupid.


Luckily the problems were minor, but Toyota in the old days would have check the problem once and fixed it. And for the problem after the 36k miles, not problem because it was documented from day one, I even had voice recordings of the service manager wanting to order a new head unit and be done with it.

 

The biggest issue with the article in question is the sample size. ~250 complaints out of how many hundreds of thousands of vehicles over how many years?

 

Behind the Ford Maverick and the Hyundai Santa Cruz over the last decade? Damn, those trucks have been out longer than I remember. I am going to have to slow down the drinking I guess.

 

Oh poop,,,gonna have to sell my pos..

 

When I told my buddy that I had bought a Tacoma, back in the Fall of 2005 he told me that Toyota trucks were the ugliest and rustiest piece of shit trucks driving around Vancouver.

I’m on the other side of the country and I was not happy with his response.

A couple of months later we were talking and he asked if I remembered what he had said. I confirmed. And then he apologized and stated that his statement was based on observation. But with further examination of the data he came to realize that the reason he was seeing rusty beat up Toyota trucks on the road was because they were all over 20 years old and still running. There were almost no trucks of other makes from the same era still operating.

This is history. Any manufacturer can change their ways, in any direction, but this was my early experience with my 2005 Tacoma which I owned for 13 years and 587,000 km with no unreasonable repair expenses short of the frame recall, which only really cost me my dignity, as I had to drive a minivan while my truck was being repaired. Then I traded the same truck in on a 2018 and received $6,000 against the new vehicle. The 2018 is just shy of 200,000 km now with only fluid changes and front pads done.

I owned 3 GM/Chevy trucks before and it will take a lot for them to win me back after my experiences on both sides. It’s not impossible, but it does seem improbable.

 

This is it, I hate my piece-o-shit Tacoma. I loved it till I read MotorBiscuit - changed my mind forever and I'm now buying a Jeep

 

Journalistic is probably giving too much credit just by being included in the sentence. I don’t think anybody who was thumbing through Hot Rod when I was a boy™ thought of it as anything more than an avenue to sell stuff in the back of the magazine.

 

I agree. Any magazine or publication can be considered "journalism". The question is, does it have any value to to it? What is the goal of the article? What is their intent? Are we being stimulated on a intellectual level or are we just being triggered?

When we're all getting blasted with this shit constantly day after day, it gets harder to tell the difference.

 

Not trying to be dismissive or even critical of people’s issues with Tacomas, real or perceived, but…the biscuit strikes again? Please cue the circus music.

Standard disclaimer: if you‘ve had issues, or this truck has somehow ruined your lifelong expectations of what a “real” Toyota should be, take advantage of its spectacular resale value and select any other truck that you believe is a better product, or plunk some money down on a Gen4 later this year

 

!!FR!! Someone will gladly pay u to take that lemon off your hands, the resale value with a blown engine probably better than competing models…. Resale is king, all cars/trucks going to have issues(some imaginary)

 

And…..

 

Hey Tacomaworld,

I am not a brand loyalist and I am open to the possibility that the Tacoma is the least reliable option among mid-size trucks. THAT SAID, this article is less than useless in making an assessment of the Tacoma's reliability.

Let's discuss why.

First, an abstract concept like "reliability" needs some sort of concrete definition in order to make comparisons.

Second, the variables measured need to account for endogenous and confounding variables. Colloquially, people say things like "correlation isn't causation" to get at this idea, but you can think of it in an example. The average length of women's skirts on Wall Street is a surprisingly good predictor of if the stock market will be in bull mode or bear mode - shorter the better things tend to go. Do short skirts cause bull markets? Probably not. Do bull markets cause drive women to put on short skirts? Well, maybe, but then again, maybe it's a third variable. Low interest rates and high profits drive up share prices, everyone gets excited, and skirts, they just get shorter.

Third, the comparison sets need to be, well, comparable. Colloquially, people say you need to compare "apples to apples" to judge the fitness of a particular apple. You cannot compare an apple to an orange and expect to know how good that apple is in comparison to other apples.

The motor biscuit article breaks the last two rules, and it breaks them pretty badly. Regarding the definition of reliability, the motorbiscuit site outsources the definition to another site called RepairPal which in turn focuses on the average cost, frequency, and severity of repairs. So props to RepairPal, they've got a concrete-ish idea of what reliability means.

Here's where it falls apart. Is there anything suspect about either the populations of vehicles RepairPal is using for comparison or the groups of owners? For instance, RepairPal says Tacoma owners bring their cars in for repair more frequently than other mid-size truck owners. Is that because the owners live in harsher regions? Are Toyota owners more conscientious and likely to bring vehicles in for repair? Or is it really just that the trucks need repairs more often? It's impossible to tell.

More importantly, are the trucks apples-to-apples in each comparison group? Is RepairPal comparing all Tacomas across all generations from 1995 - 2023? Based on some of the issues noted, it sure seems like the second generation is in the sample. Are the other mid-size trucks from a comparable time span and generation span? Or are three generations of Tacomas - some of which are quite old at this point - being compared with a newer generation of other trucks?

Unfortunately, neither Motorbiscuit nor RepairPal have any information about these issues. It's one thing to create a comparison metric and note its shortcomings. It's another to not be clear at all - and that's where we are with these two sites.

So, could the Tacoma be less reliable than other midsize trucks? Sure. But do the articles from these sites tell us anything useful? No.

 

Found the engineer.

 

The linked article is click bait and nothing more. Anyone that clicked on the link contributed to the ad revenue it generates.

 

People triggered in this thread be like:

 

Yep I’m done too. 2022 SR5 5685 miles up for sale. I can’t deal with the fact that something might happen to my truck and that every other Tacoma is crap too. I’ll let it go for 37k.

I’ll even leave the softopper on.