As I've mentioned before, one of the things that has been surprisingly helpful in this boat phase of our lives is our one remaining car (down from five). We're the second owners of this 1995 Land Cruiser, and had it for almost 15 years, so it's been paid off for more than a decade. The first owner was a real estate company that used it to ferry clients to remote locations. While it's had a spot of trouble as it's approached its 25th year, it has been a remarkably reliable car through family road trips and as a daily driver for work, and everything in between.
We bought it originally to haul a little ski boat given to us by Heather's parents. It was the same boat they had when Heather was a kid. Before we were married we went on a water ski trip up to Elephant Butte lake with her family, and if I remembering right, a high school friend who had ended up in LC for a while (who eventually ended up marrying my middle sister - another story). We had a good time, although I believe I got a hell of a sun burn.
An important thing we learned by owning a boat was that while Heather had some interest on being on a boat, she had negligible interest in taking care of a boat, especially the mechanical bits. This turned out to be important sooner than we thought. After a couple of lake day trips in Arizona and an extended tour in a self storage lot it was clear that this really didn't fit in with our lives. After breaking it out of self storage jail I sold it to my boss at my ASU teaching gig for $1. As an aside to this aside, on the same day we sold my oldest daughter's PoS 90s era Tercel to one of his grad students for the same price. Even at that price he eventually came to the same conclusion we had, that we overpaid for this car. We learned another important lesson; even a Toyota can be driven into the ground.
When looking for this car I had a number of constraints. It needed to pull the boat, so I was looking for a something with a decent towing capacity. I have a definite bias against domestic cars, especially of that era. And I had a vague desire for a vehicle worth keeping and fixing. Over the years we had a number of vehicles that were fine, but a $1k repair bill for what was now a $2k nothing special car just went down hard.
The biggest negative is the horrible gas mileage, which has slowly become only bad. Rather, the horrible in town gas mileage can be merely bad when driven well mostly on the highway, which is our life for now. A little gadget that hooks into the car electronics gives us the feedback to routinely get 18 and sometimes even 19 mpg on the road. Before this it had only gotten 19 mpg four times in more than a decade, every time involving a loss of elevation of several thousand feet. Okay, a tail wind helps.
There are good reasons for the poor mileage. The engine alone weighs 600# more than it would today because it's designed for abuse and with enough meat to be rebuilt 3 times in a field in Kenya. The transmission is the same as used in those little airport busses. Each hold a couple bucketfuls of oil.
It's old enough that it only has 2 airbags, but it has a more important safety feature on its side - physics. It weighs 3.5 tons (confirmed by the dump scale). I've seen pictures of these things after crashes, even one with a semi. It doesn't crash into things, it seems to crash through them.
The only other objection of any substance is wind noise. It was designed while the law of the land was still 55mph (repealed in 1995). At those speeds its great, even 10-15 mph faster, but as the speed creeps up the white noise machine sets in. By about 80 it sounds like the windows are rolled down, but your hair isn't blowing around. As a result, we typically cruise in the low 70s, a compromise between mileage, noise, and time. And I've never gotten a speeding ticket in it on an interstate.
We keep comprehensive insurance on it because we still rent a lot of cars, but at this age (car and drivers), even that isn't bad (and nothing like insuring five cars and young drivers). It costs nothing to register. It costs more for emissions, which they can't really do well because its full time AWD, and the year before the electronic controls were required (although it still has them).
I happen to know it has the same birthday as our youngest daughter. This is because it was finished on the very last morning this model was made; in the afternoon they had switched over to the new model. I think that explains little things like the tan upholstery and rugs, but with the gray headliner. This was discovered when they used the VIN to order a new power steering pump and it didn't fit. It was for the afternoon model.
So on the 13th I had the engine steam cleaned. It ran a little rough for 24 hours until it finished drying out. And it redeposited a lot of the crap all over the outside of the car. Washing couldn't touch it, so I had to go over the whole thing again with cleaner wax. It was due, anyway. Well, this is the after picture. I'm too embarrassed to show the before. Not bad for a senior citizen (in car years).
