This Toyota Engine Was Slowly Eating Itself And Still Lasted 300,000 Miles

Toyota’s reputation for reliability is so embedded in car culture that it’s almost a cliché at this point. But there is a difference between a car that makes it to 100,000 miles without drama and one that absorbs a factory defect for three times that mileage, and still refuses to quit. Trusted YouTube mechanic The Car Care Nut pulled the engine from a 2009 Toyota Camry with 305,000 miles on the clock, and what he found inside should have killed the car long before it reached that number. Toyota’s 2AZ-FE four-cylinder motor, fitted to Camrys from 2002 onward, shipped from the factory in 2007 with low-tension piston rings, an invisible defect that Toyota even tried to address with a limited recall that this owner missed. As a result, over time, the rings gummed up, glazed the cylinder walls, and burned through oil at a rate t …