Test driving the 1st Gen

Look at the pinned thread on this forum about who should and should not buy one of these cars.

 

welcome!
no problems if your test driving.

if you're thinking of buying one...

 

While the pinned thread has good information, a lot of it is basic stuff that applies to any used car. My thoughts:

84k miles is very low miles (400 miles/month). If the seller is the original owner, and the car hasn't been wrecked/flooded, and is clean and seems well maintained, and I'll bet it is, it was somebody's "baby" and I'd expect it to be a great car. There's really nothing that would "wear" out with that few miles, except tires, wiper blades, etc. The only problems one might typically see are age-related, for example, the 12v and HV batteries.

As mentioned in the thread, I would check the inverter coolant pump - the fluid reservoir is the smallish, narrow, rectangular one in the back/middle of the engine compartment (of the reservoirs, it's the one closest to the driver's side of the car). You should be able to see the fluid circulating with only the key on. The pump itself is behind the driver's headlight and you can squeeze your hand through to feel it vibrating (or hear its slight hum). Honestly, if it's bad, you're almost certain to get a CEL code, and the owner would be stupid to even let you test drive it as the inverter would overheat pretty quickly, although the car would shut itself off before then. If you look down at it, the original units have a black-painted bracket mounting it to the frame. The new replacements are not painted - i.e. shiny metal. If you have any decent mechanical skills, they're not hard to replace knowledge-wise or tools, just a little bit of a PITA because of the tight space. I've done several on my cars and can do it in about an hour. A new one is $130 from McGregor Toyota online.

Of course, the common problem is the batteries. So far, I'm having good results from replacing the $250 Toyota/Optima 12v with a $22 UR1 lawn mower battery from Walmart. It comes with a 6-month warranty, and WalMart is great at honoring them. I've only had mine a few months, so I can't swear by them yet, but at $22 I can buy quite a few before equaling the OEM/aftermarket replacements.

The HV battery is why so many of these cars get sold, and why the Blue Book value is so low on them. When the cars first came out, that was the only real disappointment - lots of premature failures. FTR, it's highly unlikely that your car has the original battery after this many years. Toyota was quoting $4-5,000 for replacement batteries. I actually parked my first Gen1 for several years rather than pay that much. But then, the aftermarket batteries started appearing. I got my first one back on the road with a Dorman battery at a cost of $1800. It came with a 3-year warranty and I never had a problem during that time.

Now, unless you buy a NEW battery from Toyota, you probably won't find any of the aftermarket suppliers using the original style battery cells - they haven't been manufactured for several years, so any in existence are degrading even if unused. Instead, the vendors are upgrading the battery to use newer Gen2 cells. I bought one for one of my cars in August for $1500 with a 3-year warranty. The first one kinda failed out of the box, but the company got a replacement to me promptly and it's been working fine for the last month.

Otherwise, as the tacky thread describes, a bad transaxle can make a roaring noise that's independent of speed, rpm, turning. More often, a similar noise is just a wheel bearing. The bearing is not as easy to replace as most cars, but still not a reason to not buy. If the noise changes when you turn, it's more likely the bearing. BTW, there are still plenty of these cars being processed by the dismantlers, so used parts are plentiful.

Of course, the decision whether to buy any car is always price. What I love about the Gen1 is that all those bad batteries/high dealer prices for replacements that drove the Blue Book value down means you can get these cars cheap. Sad, but true. With a good battery, there's no reason you can't get several hundred thousand miles out of them - you'll find many people in this forum have (one new post today about an OBD reader - the owner is over 300k). My daily driver has 210k and is a wonderful car. I'd like to see that misleading reality reversed, but not before I buy up all the cheap ones, lol (I own 7 right now, just bought another last week). I don't know what your seller wants for his, but would be interested to find out.

Finally, with no offense to many of the others here and on the Yahoo "technical" site, but these cars attracted/still attract many technophiles - not so much greasy-hands mechanics as data-driven electronics guys. Very smart guys who love drilling into the smallest issues and capabilities. That's great from the standpoint of getting advice in these forums, but they also tend, IMHO, towards obsessive perfectionism that kinda ignores the basic dollars/cents value equation. When I'm not driving my Prius, I drive Ford diesel trucks and they have the same kinda guys, albeit a little greasier.

While I like these cars, they're still just cars to me; just like my trucks are just work trucks and not replacements for my undersized manhood. From my perspective, these cars are just great values - buy cheap, drive cheap, lots of miles. I would just say that you might calculate based on driving it until it dies because of those low resale values, but at 84k, that's a long time from now.

 

That's what I'm talking about! You'll be able to easily get another 100,000 miles on that car, probably lots more. Maybe at some point you have to buy a battery, or make some minor repairs, that just means you'll get another 100,000 miles. Recommendation: drive it. These cars don't like sitting around.

 

congrats, all the best!