Very few people keep their cars to 300,000 miles. Few people even spend the money to fix a car with this kind of mileage and serious oil burning problems. But the owner of this 2009 Toyota Camry is one of those rare people, which is why he went to a Car Care Nut repair shop.
This Toyota Camry is also rare. From the outside, it may look like every other gray, four-cylinder Camry produced in 2009, but it’s one of the few cars that year to be equipped with a manual transmission. According to The Car Care Nut, the owner wanted a manual transmission, found the car in Florida, and drove it back to Illinois. Since then, they have kept meticulous records on the car. The biggest expense of this Camry was gasoline. It’s also gone through two clutches, four sets of tires, and three batteries.
Aside from regular maintenance and a few miscellaneous repairs, nothing has gone wrong with this Camry. Everything about the car suggests that it has been well maintained. Besides the religious maintenance, it’s clean, the paint shines, and it has all the hubcaps. But if the owner was so careful with maintenance, what happened to the engine that burned the oil? Is it used after only 300,000 miles?
According to The Car Care Nut, the problem of oil burning is not the age of the engine, but bad piston rings. Toyota’s 2AZ-FE 2.4-liter four-cylinder had oil burn problems from the start. It issued a technical service bulletin to address the problem, which affected the 2007 to 2011 Camry, along with other Toyota and Seven models.
The solution is to replace the short block and rebuild the engine with new piston rings and pistons, which is exactly what the customer does. Putting a new/rebuilt engine in a fourteen-year-old Camry with 300,000 miles might seem odd. The cost of the repair work will make a nice down payment on a new Nightshade Special Edition Camry. But if rowing gears on a manual transmission Camry is your thing, where do you find an alternative?