used car buyers BEWARE, My yearly PSA Options

[scotty b]

Long story short, I do a fair amount of light collision werk for a local used car lot. VERY reputable guys who usually deal in Mercedes Audis etc. They bought this 2003 Toyota Tacoma at an auction house in Pa. shipped it to Va and sold it. The new owner goes to get the oil changed and when the lift contacted the frame a chunk of " something " popped off to reveal a hole. I first proceed to look at that hole and eyeball the frame as a whole and noticed ALOT of odd shaped areas, as well as NO welds. These frame are nothing more than stamped C channels lap welded together so the welds are quite obvious. After the initial hole was opened up I proceeded to take a hammer to the rest of the frame. The holes were coverd with aluminum tape, bondo'd over then undercoated.The pictures will complete the rest of the story. BTW truck only has 51,000 miles on it. And yes there will be a lawsuit either towards the auction house or the dealer who ran it through there.

[mel reckling]

That is quite amazing. Toyota should be thrown in front of the bus for building a product that looks like that in 4 years.

I sold Toyotas for nearly 10 years from 79-89 and although this truck here has nothing to do with some of what I've seen, they screwed the customers for years.

From the early 70s Toyota was skirting an import tariff of 25% by bringing truck chassis without beds into the U.S. and that allowed them to be taxed as an unassembled vehicle at a rate of 4%(same as parts). They built a bed assembly plant in California(Long Beach, I believe) and shipped the beds to the various ports of entry around the U.S. You could go to any port and see thousands and thousands sitting out in the open in the salt air waiting for chassis. Since they did body changes every 4 years, there was little need to turn them over quickly. I'm sure the notoriously short life of their beds was influenced by this.

The tax law was changed in 1980 and our trucks went up $800 in a single day when they were only around $5,000. They didn't stop doing the process they had started. My 85 SR5 had a perfect driver's side frame and a gone-like-your-pictures curbside in 10 yrs. and had to do the bed after 4 years.

There is a possibility this truck could have spent some time under water, but the brake lines look surprisingly good in comparison with the other metal. Lots of hurricane vehicles around that time, my neighbor got a limited edition Toyota truck out of Florida that was mashed up really bad from trees and rolled over.