Advice on Buying a turbo tacoma

I've been impressed with the CX kit FWIW. As long as the motor runs good, you can work with what's there. You stock ECU can trim a little bit larger injectors and generally do fine on 5lb of boost or so. If you want more power later, the AEM F/IC is bad cheap and easy to tune yourself. If you are somewhat familiar with turbo stuffs, and can wrench, and the truck runs good right now, I wouldn't be too worried.

 

If the idea of a turbo Taco sounds good to you then you should get an N/A model and buy an engine from craigslist or even ebay. you can build it yourself and have the confidence it was done right. Thats my plan anyway. just build a seperate engine out of the truck and drop in the new shiny turbo one

 

I see you're also a gambler

 

I have put about 15,000 miles on a CX kit over two and a half years. The power is incomparable to even a well tuned super charger. My truck makes 300 whp on a conservative tune and gets better mpg than stock. On the other hand, there are dozens more modes of failure with the set up and the truck as a whole is much more finicky. I.e. if your preventative maintenance and such isn't spot on there is a significantly higher probability of failure across a wider range of components compared to stock.

Drive the thing. Put it at WOT and if it runs well it's probably a sign. Check around the turbo and the oil feed for leaks. Make sure the AFR's are in the right places. Frankly, I would try to get the cost a lot lower. It sounds like he's running the turbo that came with the kit which is the worst part of the kit. He probably only has a couple thousands dollars into the turbo system so he's basically asking ~$7,000 for a Tacoma with over 250,000 miles.

 

Yes the good old days when 500 hp street cars was the normal.

In my crowd any way

gas was 40 cents a gallon