Oct 3, 2024
Why I love my old 4Runner
With cars getting ever more technologically advanced, I've never loved my dumb 4Runner more.
A few years ago I sold my Kia Stinger and bought a 2009 Toyota 4Runner. While I didn’t know it at the time, the 4Runner would become my favorite car that I’ve ever owned. Let me tell you why:
It’s Simple
New cars these days love to do everything for you and offer every feature under the sun. Cars now are connected to the internet, have fancy integrated infotainment systems and advanced driver assist features. All these new features are cool on the surface but it’s become practically impossible to buy a “dumb” car now.
My 2009 4Runner is peak “dumb car” and I love it, no driver assist features (besides cruise control), no infotainment, no “connected” car features, no telemetry to worry about. It functions perfectly as a car and doesn’t try to do anything else.
It’s Cheap
All those features on your brand new car are cool, but they are also make repairing a car super expensive. If you want a solid example of what I mean, look no further than this owner of a 2020 Ford F-150 complaining that a new taillight costs $2,400. Blind spot detection is great especially for a larger vehicle, but it comes at a very steep cost if you ever want to replace it.
Compare that to my 4Runner that when I got it, had cracked headlights with moisture seeping in. They were bad and I knew I had to replace them but to my surprise, I found that each headlight housing cost ~$100 and I was able to replace both headlights and add some very nice light bulbs for around $250.
Now the 4Runner is not immune from expensive repairs and when I got it I had to put about $7k worth of work into the car. Nevertheless, after all the repairs I was into the vehicle for just a hair over $20k which is still super cheap compared to even reasonably priced new cars.
It’s Reliable
Continuing my earlier point about the car being simple. The simplicity makes the car very reliable. I go “off-grid” pretty often here in Colorado where you are far away from cell service, let alone a gas station or mechanics shop. When you’re off grid all the cool features of new cars become massive liabilities.
Modern cars are highly integrated which introduces many more points of failure, an infotainment systems may take down the entire vehicle depending on how integrated it is and so can driver assist features. My 4Runner has many of these same features but unlike modern cars, the systems are’t integrated, if my head unit goes down while I’m on a trail, I can rest assured that it won’t affect any other systems in the car.
Driving my 4runner every day, I realize just how “special” the car is becoming. I will keep the car until it can no longer run and it will be a sad day when I have to finally replace it with a more modern car.