My wife and I have been looking for a Landcruiser for her for 3-4 months and have driven close to a dozen in various states of repair and wildy varying prices. We finally found our baby on Monday. It’s a ‘96 FZJ80, Green, Grey leather interior with 153k on the odo. The exterior is in very good shape and the interior is in excellent shape. It had three major issues which we used as bargaining points:

1) Cruise Control didn’t work
2) Check Engine light was on
3) Missing all back and 3rd row head rests.

We took it to our mechanic (Bob at Foreign Affair in Schertz, TX) and he plugged it in. Not good initially, misfire on cyl 6 and bad catalytic converter. He checked it out and it turns out the cat is fine and may have been marked bad when cyl 6 misfired. 6 is fine now.

We went back to the dealer and set our price and haggled. We hit an EXCELLENT price for (dealer or not) for a ‘cruiser in this shape and they found the headrests at the the trade-in dealer, so we were good to go. For the cruise control I hit the amazlingly useful Landcruiser forums at IH8MUD and found that I might try checking the brake fluid level indicator (float in the fluid reservoir) and cycling the actuator (motor attached to the throttle). That did the trick, so we dodged a bullet on that possibly expensive repair!

The bad news is that it needs new front brakes/rotors…ouch! But hey, we got our ‘cruiser and all is well with the world.

You gotta love a vehicle that has factory options for a snorkel, super-charger and heated front seats!