Good Info About Fluid Maintenance & More

Not really specific to 5th gens but be aware as your 5th gen ages.

https://youtu.be/rM0YeYD66hQ

 

100k for transmission,diffs and transfer case fluid is pushing it.
Timing chains last onger than stated except maybe on these complex new engines

 

It’s always worth asking yourself: What makes you think that a mechanic, who (no offense) probably only has a high school education and works on many different brands and only has access to published service manuals...

… Would know more about the inner workings of a Toyota than the engineers with advanced university degrees who work at and are trained by Toyota itself(!) and actually designed the car and wrote those service manuals.

hmmmm……

 

I wonder if any of the higher mileage 5th gen's around here have had the timing chain replaced.
I thought the appeal of a chain was that it didn't need to be replaced every 100K.

If I'm going to replace the chain so often, I'd rather have a nice quiet belt, like my 2UZ had. Which, BTW, made it around 240K miles without failing. I don't, however, recommend that anyone let it go that long.

Edit: I didn't watch the video. I hate supporting YouTube bloggers who don't necessarily know what they're talking about.

 

I do agree, however mechanics generally go to some sort of trade school to become certified.

 

My wife's 2010 has 350k on it and I honestly couldn't tell you if it has had a chain done at all but it does run as quiet as my 2013 with 115k on it and doesn't really feel any different.

 

350K, Nice! I hadn't planned on messing with the chain anytime soon, so that's good to hear.

 

Your right... I was a bit unfair. And having wrenched on cars myself since I was handing my dad tools at age 6 or so I do totally get how frustrating it can be when the engineers obviously didn't think about maintainability and design things to be easy to access/repair (looking at you VW/Audi/BMW/...)

But having worked on the other side in Engineering I also know that all these design decisions are done for a reason, and its never a wild guess or to deliberately set things up to fail - there is WAY too much legal/financial liability at stake in warranty claims and recalls to just throw caution to the wind like that. The tranny fluid is a good example. Yes, there are environmental and regulatory factors at play in the decision and I believe that the move to lifetime fluids is all about reducing waste. But I am sure that they did enough durability testing to have reasonable statistic certainty that most of them wouldn't blow up during average lifetimes resulting in a lot of warranty work. Now would I change it anyway at some point to be safe? yes probably. But the average owner who keeps a car 5-7 years doesn't need to.

The timing chain is another issue. Ive never seen a vehicle with a chain that had a defined change interval. Belts do for sure, as the failure mode is usually a catastrophic break that will leave you stranded or worse. But the failure mode of a chain is different... they mostly tend to just stretch with age, slowly getting noisy and maybe throwing the timing off a bit. One of my dream cars, the Honda S2000, is known for this happening when they get over 100k, but the fix doesn't usually need a new chain, rather you can get a kit with a replacement tensioner and and modified cam gear made to take up the slack (both of which can be done without taking apart the bottom end of the engine or removing the crank bolt)

And frankly, even belts have gotten far better over the years. I'm sure you remember back in the 80s when they where all rated to 60k and we always did them early "just in case"... Now the typical spec is 100-120k and my Dad did his own worst case scenario being lazy and waiting till over 200k to do the one on a 2001? ~ish Camry they used to drive. It never broke....

 

So far, Toyota seems to do a decent job of making things easy to maintain.

I believe some of the 4th gen 4Runners came with "lifetime" transmission fluid. I'm not sure why they seem to have switched back to a drain and refill schedule.

The belt on my '03 2UZ 4Runner made it ~240K, but I certainly don't recommend pushing it that long..

 

Timing chains - I bought a 1988 4R new with the 22R-E. Put 305k on it, never touched the chain. My 2006 Scion has 220k on the original chain. My 2019 4R has 105k so far. I like chains

 

I would hazard a guess that in the case of fluid changes, extended intervals are, in part, driven by marketing as they contribute to cost of ownership. Engineering probably has an interval that they prefer and marketing probably wants something longer and they settle somewhere in between where they can both live.

 

That certainly doesn't seem to match what I'm reading here. We have some high mileage 4Runners running around in the original chain. And, I've never heard of a chain being replaced at 100K before.

I'm trying to figure out what possible advantage going back to chains would offer, if they required the same maintenance as a belt.

 

We hate engineers because of how hard they make things to work on, not because of the maintenance intervals.

 

Plenty of people way over 100K with original chains. A buddy needed head gaskets and didn't change the original chains. I think he's at 250K now.

The point of this post was mostly for the fluids...They do need to be changed regularly. Trans, diffs, brake, coolant...

 

As an engineer, I can tell you there are some real idiots with engineering degrees as well as geniuses. I've seen engineers design parts where you can't physically reach a weld nozzle or wrench in where needed to put it together.

Having experience with industrial facility maintenance, I can tell you there are some really sharp guys without degrees that know how machines work and more importantly, how they fail and how to fix them.
Engineers that design products don't always have good visibility to how they perform long term because they've already moved on to make the next new thing. Automotive does have engineers looking at how long vehicles last and what maintenance is suggested but they are not the same team as original designers. There is also variation between companies and regions. German engineer writes a suggested task, he means do it. American writes a suggestion, he means it would be a good idea if you want to do it.


Timing chains are pretty robust.

Oils and fluids do advance over time just like other products which can affect interval needs.

Diff and trans fluid life varies wildly between users due to how they use vehicles.
That said, I've seen trucks go well over 100k with no changing diffs or trans and not have issues. Some of those were old farm trucks seeing heavy duty uses even. Then I've seen trucks that were normal unmodified daily drivers suffer early trans or diff failures.

So basically, follow the manual or just do what makes you feel comfortable for maintenance.

 

Agreed. Changing fluids at scheduled intervals is cheap insurance.

 

What I'm saying is that I don't believe any maintenance is required or recommended by Toyota. Looking at the maintenance schedule and manual, and I'm just not seeing anything that suggests a 100K timing chain interval. Or, any scheduled maintenance, for that matter.

I thought manufacturers were switching back to chains for lack of maintenance. If I were going to have to tear my front end apart every 100K, I'd rather have a belt.

 

I don't believe anyone suggested that those fluids shouldn't be changed.

 

Lot of people blame things on engineers who have no understanding of why certain decisions were made. A lot of engines are used in multiple different vehicles so access to things changes depending on which vehicle it is put in. Engineer probably is not making the decision of which engine to put in a vehicle, they are tasked with making this engine fit in this vehicle which may be a sub-optimal situation. Other decisions are forced by the manufacturing process. So yeah, the guys that hate engineers, give them the same parameters that the engineer is working with and they wouldn't do any better.

 

Engineering is much less about designing to an ideal and much more about compromise. Beyond that, if your explanation of the reasoning behind lifetime transmission fluid is true, then it sucks. Deciding to call it a “lifetime fluid” because it will last longer than the first owner will own the car, or until the car is out of warranty and the repair is no longer the company’s responsibility — that right there is some pretty effed-up thinking.

The mechanics see the results of the engineering failures on a daily basis. They have information about the inner workings that the engineers do not.

 

Right, but in your previous post it sounded like it had been implied earlier. I must have misunderstood.

 

Again, there are people here with over 300K with original chains. Maybe I'll replace mine at 400K when I get a p0016 code.

 

Most engineers are seeing a small part and not the whole and they are working within the parameters they are given. And when someone else is in charge of parts procurement, what the engineer specified is not always what is used.

It is easy to point fingers and blame when you don't know the reasons behind why decisions were made the way they were.

 

You never did the plastic chain guides? The guides are what goes bad on the 22R-E.

 

Right, you might be on the bad end of the tolerance stack while someone else is on the good end...

 

No offense, but I went to engineering school and have worked in industry for 25 years... I know its all a compromise. They also don't design things to "last forever" unless there are specific reasons to do so. The best engineering is about coming up with the most elegant (simplest/lightest/cheapest/fastest/etc) solution that fits the requirement.

And my opinions on the lifetime fluid are just that - opinions. A guess. No more authoritative than yours or anyone else on here. I don't work at Toyota so I don't know the reason, but I do know that all manufacturers have been moving to long drain intervals due to a combination of regulatory pressure to reduce waste, and improved chemicals science that makes it possible. The guys in the BMW forums love to point out that BMW went from 3-5k oil change intervals to 10-15k right around the same time they introduced free scheduled dealer maintenance. It is suspect.

We know nothing is forever. I don't actually think when Toyota says lifetime they mean the duration of the powertrain warranty. But I know that they wouldn't actually use infinity or some open ended concept subject to interpretation internally. Engineering would have to put an actual number on it, something they could durability test against to prove its viable. If I had to guess - and again this is a WAG on my part - they probably had the bean counters do some statistical modelling on the age range of existing vehicles on the road, made up a curve and picked some number that covered 80-90% of it. Given the stats that the average age of the US car fleet is now approaching 15 years I wouldn't be surprised if the number they came up with is somewhere in the range of 15-20 years (mapping to 240k miles using the typical 12k/yr average).

The mechanics do see it for sure, but good engineers do as well, and they get input from long term testing and data back from warranty claim trends. If Toyota is doing its job right the powertrain and chassis engineering departments have access to far more data on a few orders of magnitude greater number of cars than a single mechanic does looking just at the cars that happen to come though his shop. And remember that mechanics dateset is a self selected group of vehicles with problems (i.e. the inverse of "survivor bias"... or think of it like doing a medical study without a control group).

 

Great conversation about engineering in this thread, even if it’s not perfectly on topic.

I especially liked the comment that engineering is about compromise. It’s not difficult to make something that works and doesn't break. But it’s much more more difficult to make something that works and doesnt break while under a huge list of real-life constraints. These constraints can be weight, materials, intended use, conditions of use, laws, maintainance and on and on.

Which makes me curious….In the engineering/manufacturing world, who is responsible for defining these constraints and providing engineers with the design brief? Other types of engineers? How does the proverbial “bean counter” actually interact with an engineering team? This is all fascinating stuff for me.

Regarding mechanics, a good one that is a diagnostic thinker, and learn from their experience, can develop helpful knowledge on how a particular vehicle/design can fail, what to worry about, and when to worry about it, while considering the customer’s use of the vehicle. I have the opinion that higher education is not necessary to (or even can guarantee) development of these skills, because it has more to do with how reflective person is, and how much they want to devote the mental energy to a client’s problem (in others words, being diligent). That’s why so many of us like to ask mechanics what they think about something in particular. But diligence is not a given…so that’s why we treat good mechanics as if they are pure gold!

 

What is the going rate for a drain and fill for tranny fluid on a 5th gen at a Toyota dealer?

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Update. I just found a coupon for $229 for a dealer in New Orleans with a Google search. Up to 12 quarts. Sound about right for the price?

 

I did not. I happened to have a personal friend who was also the parts lead at a local dealership. He explained to me that it would rattle a little now and then, but that nothing would really break. He was right in my case. Looking back, those guides would have been interesting to see at 300k.

 

It kinda does, if the reason others haven't replaced them is because it isn't necessary.

If there were anything in the maintenance book indicating that the chain should be replaced every 100K, I'd agree with you. But, there's literally nothing to suggest it's necessary, other than a handful of people on the internet with stretched chains.