First Tacoma - For Granddaughter's First Car!

I love cars as does my wife. We always have. When I met my wife in the early 1970's (yeah, I am that old) and we began dating she drove a 1973 Datsun 240Z and I drove a 1972 MGB. We married in January 1977 and by 1986 we had four kids. And, the sports cars were gone and in there place was a home mortgage, a kid hauler and a commute car. In 1987 I bought a Toyota pickup with a four cylinder and a four speed and loved it. In 1989 I upgraded to a Toyota pickup SR5 access cab with a six cylinder and an automatic and all the bells and whistles. A great truck that I used as a commute car for 12 years and over 200,000 miles. It blew a head gasket at 130,000 miles and Toyota covered it stating it was a defect issue for that year. And, while they were in there they gave me a new water pump and charged me very little for a valve job. What a company. I sold that trunk in 2001 and bought a new 2001 Tundra SR5 access cab. I still have that truck with only 130,000 miles (work gave me a company car!)

Time went by and we got the kids out of college loan free. I retired at 57 years old with 35 years with the same company (loved that job!). Now it was our turn again. We've had a couple Porsches (a '97 993 Turbo I should have kept!) and a few BMWs. In 2016 my wife needed a new car so we bought the first year of the BMW M2 and did a European Delivery. Amazing trip; Germany, France, Switzerland and Austria.... AND, two laps on the Nurburgring.

So, if you have read this far.... my oldest granddaughter turns 16 in February. Her father has a Lexus GS350 and mom (my daughter) has a Chevrolet Silverado Trail Boss. I decided to find (& buy) a nice first car for the granddaughter. She likes the Tacomas and I did my homework on them. I love her, but I didn't want to spoil her with a new $40K (or $50k+) Tacoma or even a $30K used one. I liked the second generation Tacoma and liked the 2015 being the last year of that generation. And, it has all the safety features - ABS, side and curtain air bags.

I kept an eye out for a used one on the forums, Craigslist, Autotrader and so on. And, one day a nice 2015 Access Cab 4 cylinder auto lightly optioned with 165,000 miles showed up on Craigslist. It was a two owner with a clean CarFax. I have always believed that you are buying the seller as much as the car. The seller had owned the Tacoma for the last 5 years and 140,000 miles. He kept up on the maintenance and like me was anal about changing the oil.

The Tacoma's PPI was clean. Thus... my granddaughter had her first car.

One thing that bothered me was the looks of the 215/70 15 tires. They just didn't fill the wheel wells. I searched this forum and found several post regarding this topic. The tires that came on the Tacoma were good but not great. Ahhhh .. an excuse for the first mod. I followed the lead of others and swapped the stock tires for 235/75 15 tires. Great addition, thank you for that. The last photo has the new tires installed.

Great forum and I am honored to be part of it.

 

What a beauty. That engine looks mint.

 

First off, welcome to TW. Second, that's a very nice gift. Props. Third, HOLY CRAP that thing is clean. If it runs as good as it looks that thing will last a LOOOOONG time.

 

Welcome to TW!

My first vehicle was a 2010 Tacoma (brand new at the time), and I still have it! I see your granddaughter's truck is a base model, so thing I definitely recommend you do is install intermittent wipers!

 

I'll bet the frame is clean enough to off of. One good thing about California is that vehicles do not rust!

 

I love living in the midwest but holy crap they are brain dead when it comes to how to deal with snow. We had low 40 degree rains for for a couple of days last week. And out of fear it could turn to ice EVERYTHING is over salted already. I just got my truck less than 2 months ago and I here I am driving through miles of heavy salt. It's almost like they try to make vehicles rusty. I usually forget that there are people that live in areas that don't have brand new rusty cars. It's so foreign to me.

 

Wow very nice love mine… great first vehicle .

 

Thank you grandpa, and welcome to TW.

4 cylinder auto, good choice for a young driver. The extra mpg will be appreciated.

May I respectfully suggest future mods. Phone holder an absolute must. I’ve owned several. Offroam and ram are the only ones I’ve kept.

If it has the stock speakers, they gotta go. The jump in sound quality was huge when I changed mine. You could even do an incentive based thing. Like no tickets or accidents = free speakers.

 

Awesome first post.
Welcome to TW!

 

Welcome to TW!

Great first post. You’re Grandpa of the Year!

 

Welcome to TW!!

 

My 2010 DCLB Prerunner very possibly will be my oldest granddaughters first vehicle. You made a good choice.

I have owned mine since new, the last day of 2009. Has 97,000 original miles, and got Mobil 1 since first oil change after break in, and each 5k after that. Rear axle, power steering and automatic trans have also had Mobil 1 almost since new, and all get fluid changes at sane intervals.

Being my truck, she will get it with all the mods done to it. ICON suspension on all corners, Tru Trac diff, Camburg ball joint upper arms, gusseted spindles, DTLT headers with URD Y pipe, a couple of URD black boxes, CSF aluminum radiator, dedicated trans cooler with no trans fluid in radiator, oem trans cooler as power steering cooler, Volant under hood scoop with TorSpeed air box mod, intake manifold spacer, Wet Okolie seat covers since new and WeatherTech mats since new. Also has the Total Chaos bed supports, the AMP bed extender, and the axle holders for transporting mtb, plus the forward bed support for dirt bikes. She will even get the recently installed Alpharex headlights and taillights.

One feature my wife has always raved about is the BAMF rock sliders and Avid brush guards at the front and back. They likely saved a zillion door dings.

Still need to install the modified cam gears, plus ensure the ball joints are tight.

When new, and as needed I use the corrosion prevention compounds we use on aircraft to preserve the entire frame. Also, since new, I added drain hose to the oem AC drain, allowing the water to drain under the truck, not onto the frame.

As a grandparent also, my attitude is one where if good enough for me, it will be fine for her.

She is Florida born and raised, so between her redneck upbringing and good values towards life, it will suit her fine when she gets the truck. And she does deserve it.

Awesome to see other grandparents thinking in similar ways.

 

Welcome to TW!

 

Second for phone holder.
Offroam is money well spent.

 

Thanks for the kind comments and warm welcome. I have spent a lot of time lurking on this forum while shopping for the Tacoma. It is an active forum with a ton of great information. The search feature is outstanding.

It is super clean even for a So Cal car. I cannot imagine living and driving in the cold and snow. I was born and raised in Los Angeles and live just above LA 10 miles in from Malibu. The weather is amazing. This is a great place for cars. You just have to get past the traffic, crime, mentally ill & drug addicted (AKA homeless), high taxes, crazy property values and so on.

Never thought of that. An OE one from Toyota is only $150 and I found a YouTube video for installing it. Thank you.

Good call. We have a handsfree law here so that would be a good idea. I know her car only has front speakers. I am sure speaker upgrades and additions are coming in the future.

Wow… you have done a great job modifying your Tacoma. Your granddaughter will be getting a special car!

 

Welcome to TacomaWorld: You'll like it here! You purchased the right truck for your Grand Daughter. I acquired my 2014 in June of 21 as an early retirement present from my wife. She found it and suggested I go take a looks at it. Me: "OK: what is it?" Her: "Some Toyota truck" hmmmm. 104,000 and a flawless maintenance and service history, spotless interior, WeatherTechs. Not one issue from then to the present. Next time you are at a Toyota dealer, ask them to print out the full pedigree and service history for the truck. If you're nice and bring a Box-of-Joe and donut holes from Dunkin' they will def do it for you. It will list every Toyota or dealer activity since it was made. My truck turned out to be mostly dealer maintained by-the-book, and a two owner, Toyota Certified Pre-Owned vehicle before I got it. First owner was a lease. Smart people usually take good care of their leased vehicles because if you don't, they destroy your checking account with "wear and tear" charges when you turn it in: Too many Miles-dings-stains-sketchy tires. It's my hope that this will be my last vehicle.

 

Welcome! You've got audio on the steering wheel, so might already have intermittent wipers. What you might want is the spare tire lowering helper: https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads/cheap-free-mods.4838/page-51#post-3571643

 

Welcome to TW Chuck!
I was in your situation with our youngest granddaughter a year and a half ago, but she asked if she could have my 2003 Tacoma DC OR! Of course since that is what I had been teaching her in since she was 12, I couldn’t say no. It’s going to out live me, but I managed to find a 2015 DC OR to replace it with for me. This one will definitely out live me! LOL!
I only hope you and your granddaughter have as much fun as mine and myself do!
Enjoy!

 

I have a 2010 with almost 185K miles; I had a freak mechanical failure a little over a year ago at roughly 157K miles (I drive way too much) in which the original thermostat failed and touched off a chain of events that blew my head gasket. I take incredibly good care of my truck and it still confounds me to this day that the head gasket failed at less than 160K miles; I have reason to believe that the head gasket was on its way out as early as April 2021 because I found oil in the coolant reservoir. I talked to another mechanic (not my own) who used to be a Toyota master tech, and while he only gave my truck a onceover, his experience with these engines didn't lead him to believe that the head gasket was blown.

My mechanic did both a leak-down test and a pressure test at some point before the summer of 2021, and they came back fine. The coolant levels were normal, there were no warning lights on, and the truck was not running hot (yet). Then, I got my frame replaced under the recall in November 2021, at roughly 140K miles; I had the water pump replaced because it was recommended by numerous people I trusted to do this between 140K and 145K, because this is when they tend to fail, and I didn't have to pay any labor because the engine had to come out during the frame replacement.

From late summer/early fall of 2021 through July of 2022, my truck started having all sorts of bizarre symptoms that meant nothing to me at the time, but I look back it I realize that the head gasket was about to go. My truck developed a misfire in late 2021-early 2022 that was temporarily solved by replacing an injector and all four coil packs. My friend helped me replace the spark plugs in October 2021, at 140K (shortly before the frame replacement). My truck never had a CEL (Check Engine Light to the layperson) during this time, except when my friend and I accidentally made it come on when we replaced the spark plugs, but it threw a couple codes when my mechanic plugged his OBD2 scanner in (including a misfire on either cylinder #1 or #2; I forget which). A buddy of mine who drives basically the same truck as me, and happened to be working as a Toyota tech at the time, ran EFI cleaner through my truck's fuel injection system and that really improved performance.

To this day, it sometimes takes my gas gauge a little while to register that the tank is full, especially if I fill up from a quarter of a tank or less; I have no idea what causes this, but it was doing it before the frame replacement, and I am 99% sure that it's purely due to old age and driving on shitty Northeast roads...

In July 2022, my truck's temperature gauge shot up into the red on startup, but immediately came back down into the normal zone (it may have done this twice, but I don't remember); I did not top off the coolant because it seemed a tiny bit low, but I attributed this to my instrument cluster having electrical problems, and one of my mechanic friends concurred.

I drove my truck to Syracuse for a big car show at the New York State Fairgrounds in July 2022, leaving on a Thursday morning and staying in Syracuse until Sunday afternoon; I then drove another hour or so west to Rochester to see my cousin who I had not seen in more than 20 years. After a night on the town with him and spending the night at his house, I left first thing Monday morning and drove about five hours back to Pennsylvania with no issues. My parents and I flew out to California for a week for a family reunion, and the truck sat for a week (late July-early August) for the duration.

My dad rented a beach house in Rockport, Massachusetts from one of his Navy buddies for a week in September 2022. Even my dad's GMC Yukon can get a little cramped with three adults, a large Labrador Retriever, and a metric shit-ton of luggage. We decided to take two vehicles, with parents in the Yukon with all the luggage, and the dog with me in my truck. A least that was the original plan...

We were supposed to leave on Saturday, but that got pushed back to Sunday; I drove to a custom van show/truck-in at the Schuylkill County Fairgrounds, which was over an hour and a half from our house. The trip up was fine, and the truck gave no inclination of what was about to happen. I love exploring ghost towns, so I decided to visit Centralia for the umpteenth time that year because it was so close to the Schuylkill Fairgrounds; I drove to Centralia without an issue as well, at highway speeds and with the A/C cranked!

After exploring Centralia for a bit, I headed roughly two hours back home, stopping at a Wawa about halfway so I could top off the truck's tank and empty my own; I started the truck and it did that weird thing where the temperature gauge briefly shot into the red. Remembering this from July, I shut off the truck and restarted it to see if I could replicate the issue. Everything was normal.

I had guzzled an unholy amount of liquids, so within an hour, I had to empty my tank again; I stopped at another Wawa maybe twenty minutes from my house, went in to pee, and came back out. I started the truck, and this time it overheated for real, with the temperature gauge going almost all the way to the top and staying there. Freaking out, I shut off the engine immediately and popped the hood. A guy who happened to be in the parking lot told me that the thermostat was the likely cause; I wasn't about to open the radiator cap, but the coolant level in the plastic reservoir was normal. I let the truck sit for about an hour before driving it home; I put the windows down and cranked the heat, but even though my truck operated at a normal temperature while moving, it would start to overheat whenever I slowed down and really started to bad if I totally stopped. I was on the phone with @shakerhood while trying to limp my truck home and he probably remembers this well.

I got the truck home just fine, but the next morning I fired it up and realized that the heat wasn't working. There was coolant in both the radiator and the reservoir, and the engine wasn't overheating, but the heater was blowing cold air. This led to a theory the thermostat was stuck shut and coolant wasn't getting where it needed to be; I was all excited to take my truck on another big roadtrip, and not only did our trip to Massachusetts get delayed by yet another day, but I made the difficult decision to leave the truck with my mechanic for the week and take my mom's Nissan Murano to Massachusetts.

I was convinced that the head gasket was blown, and dad was even going to help pay for it because I didn't have the money to pay for such a repair at that time; I left it with my mechanic, and he did both the leak-down test and the pressure test yet again. Once again, these did not point towards a blown head gasket. What my mechanic did find however, was just what I had suspected. The thermostat had worn out due to old age and gotten stuck shut, so there was enough coolant in the system to keep the engine from getting nuked, but not enough to keep the engine cool at idle or apparently to reach the heater core and allow the heat to work...

My mechanic replaced the thermostat, replaced the heater bypass pipe, and of course performed a coolant flush; I got the truck back seemingly good as new when I returned from Massachusetts, but it gets worse...For maybe two weeks, I drove the truck without issue, commuting to work and going to area car shows. It was October, so I'd done my annual tradition of decorating my truck as a "Zombie Outbreak Response Vehicle" for Halloween. My friend Dave, who used to be a mechanic before he got tired it of it and became a truck driver, wanted to meet in Centralia to do some exploring; I realized that Centralia was the perfect backdrop for a fictional zombie apocalypse, and thus the perfect place to take my truck for a photo shoot. I met a bunch of friends for dinner at Buffalo Wild Wings, including my friend Shane who is also a truck driver and lives in Washington state, but was in Pennsylvania on a run. Shane had parked his truck in a shopping center parking lot and spent the day with another mutual friend of ours, and then I offered to drive him back to his rig when the other friend had to go home early; I drove Shane to his truck, and it was on the way home when I realized that heater wasn't working.

My other truck driver friend, who I was supposed to go to Centralia with the next morning, believed that was nothing actually wrong and that I just had air bubbles in the system. It is also worth noting that the heater seemed to work fine when I was driving. I drove to Centralia first thing in the morning, with my heater still only working while the truck was moving, and met my friend up there without interested; I did my zombie photo shoot, and the truck was idling with the A/C on most of the time (it was cold in the morning but really warmed up). I had absolutely no issues during this time, and made it back to my area from Centralia without incident.

I had plans to put the truck in a show in Quakertown that evening (again, it was decorated for Halloween), but I first I went to the home of my friend @Gwyns04 so that she and her boyfriend could see the truck and pose for pictures; I started the truck to move it from Gwyn's driveway into her yard for the photo shoot, and the temperature gauge went into the red again...



I still went to the car show in Quakertown, but I made an appointment with my mechanic and was able to bring it in the very next morning. For whatever reason, the truck was not showing telltale signs of a blown head gasket in September, but that morning's pressure test on the radiator yielded disturbing results and there was no strong smell of coolant from the exhaust pipe.

There was no coolant in the oil, and the truck ran just fine if the coolant level was monitored. My mechanic was able to stabilize the truck to the point that it could be safely driven locally for short distances until my dad and I decided what to do. My mechanic wanted about $5,000 for a complete head gasket job, which included machining the cylinder head and replacing the timing chain. The other option was replacing the engine with 50K mile used engine out of a totaled 2011 Tacoma, at a cost of like $7,700. Believe it or not, we were going to go with the replacement engine, because we didn't know if my engine had any unseen damage. However, I started doing my research both online and through talking to people, and determined that repairing the original engine was likely the better choice.

For starters, I knew nothing of the donor truck's history. Yes, 50K miles was low for a 2011 Tacoma in 2022, but 50K poorly-maintained miles is worse than 100K or more well-maintained miles in my opinion. I also wanted to keep my truck as original as I possibly could, because I knew I'd probably keeping the truck until 250K miles and wanted to proudly say that the engine was original; I felt like I would be embarrassed if I had to tell people that I had to replace a 2TR-FE at less than 160K miles!

We ultimately decided to go with the repair rather than replacing the entire engine. However, while my mechanic is a great mechanic, he had never done a head gasket on a 2TR-FE before and wanted to take things slow so he didn't mess something up. He also had only two or three other mechanics working under him, and it was a small shop, so he'd have to deal with other customer vehicles as well. He estimated that my truck would be out of commission for a least a week, and more than likely closer to ten days.

I talked to the dealer that had done my frame replacement, where I was on friendly terms with one of the service writers and the service manager. They would have charged double what my mechanic was asking, but they like me and by some miracle they agreed to do the job for basically what my mechanic wanted. The difference was that, unlike my mechanic, the job would take less than a week and I would get a loaner vehicle. The job was done in three days!

Another miracle, in my opinion, is that the engine suffered no actual damage from the fiasco; I think that using full synthetic oil since 80K miles and being OCD about all maintenance played a role in this. The head was not warped, and since Toyota's service guidelines did not call for it to be machined if it wasn't warped, they didn't do that. There is 2-year warranty on all parts and labor from that dealership, which is good until October 2024, so I'm not worried; I did end of having the water pump replaced again, as well as the thermostat gasket, but both of these were done at no charge to me as part of the dealer warranty because the truck started leaking coolant.

I had to replace the radiator in March 2023 at 166K miles because it started leaking, but this was unrelated to the head gasket fiasco and I had my mechanic do the job. My mechanic used a genuine Toyota radiator, but the job was much cheaper with him than it would have been at the dealership; I have pulled trailers on two separate occasions since the radiator was replaced, and my truck pulled them effortlessly!

 

Great read! Looking forward to chapter 3. In the mean time I'd like to add that I have had a few vehicles that would overheat at times. I have a '57 GM vehicle that I swear starts to overheat when it hears me open the garage door. Parade or an a 40 mph cruise in December when it's 45 out, car show that I'm leaving....same thing. pia since I bought it in 1975 with 43K on it. (hint: it's the grille" ) I had a Volvo that blew it's top once: the point is: every time this has happened and I shut it down and waited for it to cool down, even though the gauge was pegged hot when it happened, when I restarted them it had gone -down- during the wait by at least a third and would keep going down once I added some water. Just my 0.2 cents. I wish I could tell you why the gauge is still pegged. Failed thermostats is a legit reason for a blow up (staying closed), but every T-stat failure that I have experienced has been the "full open" kind: aka: No heat.