Owners manual/quality

…did I make a mistake buying a used one with 141000 mi. on it?

It sounds to me like your mistake may have been not having this used car thoroughly checked out by your mechanic before you bought it. Of course, if you did, I am mistaken.

You can go wrong with any brand of used car, especially if you don’t have it thoroughly inspected by your mechanic before you make a commitment to buy it.

You say it is leaking oil, but that might mean it is something simple, like a valve cover gasket, or something expensive, like the oil pan gasket. Saying " it is leaking oil" doesn’t tell us much. We need more details.

shadowfax, I believe in Toyota’s overall quality, but anyone who says things like “You can’t go wrong with a Toyota” when talking about a 9-year-old car with 141,000 miles on it has obviously been drinking the Kool-Aid.

Shadowfax, Do You Know Where CR’s Reliability Ratings Come From (Not The New Car Evaluations) ? Hint: If You Were A Subscriber, You’d Know.

Following all the recent Toyota Safety recalls I have seen many TV commercials extolling the efforts made by Toyota to build safe cars. They haven’t convinced everybody, though. Many people have sold their Toyotas (including a woman my wife works with who drove a less than year old Toyota) and sales have lagged.

I believe that some of the very recent models proved potentially dangerous because of severe corrosion ! I take their recent car safety campaign as saying, “Uh, sorry for building such crappy cars before. . .Buy another one and we won’t do it again.”

CSA

Register here and I think you can just download it free. https://auth.toyotaownersonline.com

I would say it is safe to use them for finding what the worst cars are.

But when they tell you that the powertrain in a 4 cylinder Mazda6 (average overall reliability) is less reliable than the powertrain in a 4 cylinder Ford Fusion (excellent, class-leading reliability), you know that something is seriously wrong with the way they split hairs. I could understand body trim differences, but not powertrain.

I take their recent car safety campaign as saying, “Uh, sorry for building such crappy cars before. . .Buy another one and we won’t do it again.”

Yes, so do I.

But I’m struggling to figure out what problems with more recent cars have to do with a 2001 Celica.

Put another way, if you want to tell me that Hondas are not necessarily ultra-reliable anymore, I can’t really argue with that based on some of the stupid problems they’ve had in recent years.

But if you want to tell me that because the current generation of Civics had an engine problem (for which they extended the warranty markedly), that therefore means my 1991 CRX is a pile of unreliable crap, I really can’t agree with your conclusion or with the logic you used to reach it.