Poor gas mileage update.

Otherwise your best bet is going to be to find any used motor you can find that is the same as the one in your truck and just swap out the engine…. You can get good used JDM engine for around $1000 if you can install it yourself… or if you have a pick a part near by you might be able to get one cheaper if you can round up a couple buddies and pull it yourself.
You will spend more money than that trying to swap in an engine that isn’t meant for that vehicle. So to answer your question, no, a tdi swap is a terrible idea if you want a working truck. Find a used engine…. Any used engine that is in ok working condition, meaning no head leaks and it isn’t seized, has all the parts and swap your engine. You have to make sure that it’s the same engine as your truck. There is 2x different versions of the v6 depending on what year your truck is. One has a drive by wire system and one has an old school throttle cable. You have to get the correct one or you will get error codes and possibly the engine just won’t run at all.

 

actually you can probably just get any version of the correct v6 and just swap the throttle body from your current engine to match. I believe the only difference is in the throttle body. So that is a good thing.

 

Your ambitions do not align with reality.

Find a v6 in better condition and swap that in. It's a much more obtainable goal than swapping an engine from another model.

Also, shit talking your mom, even if she is "actually crazy", is lame.

 

this ^ x100. Your only hope for salvaging this truck is to find a decent used version of the engine that is in your truck now and swapping it into your truck. It will probably cost you around $1000. Honestly probably less than it will cost to attempt to “tdi swap”, what ever that means…. Swapping in an engine from a different vehicle is not a straightforward as just swapping it into the truck. You will need so many additional parts and some parts you would probably have to fabricate yourself or pay someone with the knowledge and tools to fabricate them for you…. It will easily end up costing you more than the $1000 to get a used engine.

also, shit talking your mom after she bought you a $9,000 truck is wild… I assume you are still a youngin’ but if you have been driving for 3+ years already you are 100% old enough to get a job and pay for these things on your own. How do you pay for insurance and gas and all the other expenses that come with owning a vehicle? Shit is not cheap.

 

Yeah, I'm not gonna comment on the Mom thing, if it's true it's bazaar and irrelevant since it's your safety on the line. $500 is a lot of money, but it's also less that what you'll spend trying to fix this.

I once bought an oscilloscope thinking I could fix it and get a good deal, what I realized was the CRT [shadow mask] was broken, and since the part was extremely rare to find on it's own, the only path forward was to buy a working one, which was what I was trying to avoid. That's the case your in with the Tacoma, to fix all that's wrong you'd basically be purchasing a functioning Tacoma.

You could swap an engine, it would be very hard to do for under $500, even if you already have the required tools. And you'd still have all the existing problems that cant be resolved. No amount of work will change the [probably] dirty title. You'll never get that time and money back.

This is why I'm suggesting to part it out and recoup what money you can, and clean your hands of it. It's simply sunk cost fallacy.

 

your statement doesn’t make a ton of sense…. First, not sure why you think the title is “dirty”, second he said the vehicle is in good shape other than the motor being hosed and some frame rot. I guess the major issue would be how bad is the frame…. If the frame has deteriorated significantly then it is a safety issue and the truck should be scrapped!