Is Toyota V35A-FTS Engine Reliable? Well..It's Not That Simple

bro bought a research paper. and talked to the man himself. subbed.

Nobody makes these videos the way you do. Others do lots of speculation, but you do proper research and make it easy to digest too. And no fan boy bias! Very impressive.

i am from Saudi Arabia, and here we have a lot of Lexus LS500s and land cruiser LC300s, and recently after one or two years we started to notes the increase of those specific turbo charged cars going to shops and dealers for this specific issue, and most of the shop owners are starting to tell the people to not buy these cars yet, one shop even reported having more than 30 vehicles come to hos shop for bearings issues, and started a new way of fixing by pulling the engine from the car without removing the hood to cut costs and save time.

I’m a tech at a Toyota dealer in Canada and we’ve had 6 tundras with the same bearing issues. Some were work trucks and others were just daily drivers but they all failed in the exact same spot. All got short blocks and 2 of them were seized solid when they came in. One of them took so long the guy bought another tundra and then had the same issue with it so he bought a trd pro instead of waiting to get his first 2 fixed. We ended up buying the trucks back from him.

As a tech - here is a "Hack" when it comes to research papers. I had the privilege of working as a technician on research expeditions to remote locations and made a few friends in the industry. Look up the person who wrote the paper - ask them for the paper, and they will happily send you their paper- which, in most cases, they are allowed to do. The grunt that wrote that SAE paper probably didn't see a cent of your purchase sooo they will probably enjoy receiving your ping from somebody who actually wants to discuss and converse about something that they spent so many hours on getting published. Not to mention the opinion of the person who wrote the paper. -Magic

I'm a mechanical engineer and I live in Huntsville, Alabama, and I know I've heard some of the old v8s and the new TT v6s are made here at the Toyota plant in town. I just google'd "V35-FTA Alabama" and one of the first results is a forum post mentioning that, *allegedly*, one of the shifts at the plant was not properly cleaning out the engine block oil passages for some length of time till they caught it and corrected them. This would cause metal shavings to still reside in the block, ultimately getting forced to the crankshaft main bearings once started, resulting in inconsistent and sometimes substantial wear & damage to the bearings once the engines get fired up. If that's true, then perhaps the root-cause does not lie within the engine's design. Food for thought.

As an owner of a Nissan and Toyota V8 vehicle I appreciate this video. There is no replacement for displacement. High strung, stressed engines require frequent rebuilds and are for race cars.

My new neighbor is a Toyota mechanic in a very large dealership in Dallas. I asked about the 3.4 failures and he showed me a picture of 8 blocks in crates sitting out back. He says it seems to average ~20,000 miles when they fail, although he has seen it as soon as 6,000. I think it's happening more than people realize.

I can save everyone a lot of time. Yes, the engine is overstressed. Yes, it'll be mildly better than another company's engine. But it will not be as reliable as the Toyotas we all loved in the past. I would not buy one.

Undersquare geometry also generally works well for boosted engines. With better breathing efficiency, you don't need valves to be as big. Which means lighter valves that can have lighter springs and less contact stress on the cam, that kind of thing. With a smaller bore, you can have a smaller combustion chamber which can help produce the "high speed" combustion Koji mentioned. When they say "high speed" what they mean is that the burn is complete sooner after TDC. Which means that the effective expansion ratio is higher and you have more basic efficiency (think back to a LogP-V chart in your Thermo class). The high torque output doesn't necessarily mean a high peak cylinder pressure, it just means a high BMEP. So if toyota is finding a way to make higher average power stroke pressure while not spiking peak pressure, you can have both high torque as well as reliability.

You really made the most of your time with the chief engineer. I saw other videos interviewing him on the GX and noone was a prepared as you. Well done!

Toyota’s reliability era is done.

Im simple man. I see tinker i click

Men of culture we meet again

Just discovered this channel. As a scientist and professor with 6 degrees, I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to find a channel dedicated to taking such a deep, meticulous and well-researched dive into cars well beyond the generic, press release talking points most channels focus on. Well done, sir. 👏👏👏 Looking forward to exploring the rest of your video library!

40 years as an automotive/diesel tech. To quote my favorite engineer "The more complicated the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain." The only reason everyone is running a turbo these days is to try and eek out a few more mpg to get past fuel economy standards and to fool the customer into thinking they arent looking anything. Honestly, 95% of car buyers are ignorant and just hear turbo and in the head turbo=fast.

I think the reason they called it the GX550 instead of the GX340 or 350 was because people would associate the smaller number with less. People would think well its a smaller engine and it has less power, even if it has more power. Its the same reason why Mercedes still calls the C63 the C63 instead of the C40. It used to have a 6.2 that they marketed as a 6.3 to pay tribute to the old 600 from the 60s and 70s. Off topic but the point is that it had a "6.3" so they called it the C63. Then they replaced it with the 4.0 twin turbo and still called it the C63. If they had called it the C40 people would have thought it was less than the car that it replaced. Most people don't know anything about engines so they think if its smaller it must be worse. So they give it bigger number to help with sales.

From what I have learned at Tundra forums, the failure seems to be from how they wash the crankshaft after being machined. Previous crankshafts would go through two wash cycles and all metal shavings would be washed off, the new crankshafts for the 3.4 v6 seem to have still some metal shavings left behind inside the oil feed holes causing oil starvation for the connecting rod bearings and causing early failure. It seems they have increased the wash cycles to 3 or 4, it reduced the number of failures on the 2024 tundras but there still seems to be a few. I'm making an assumption here, but I guess the oil feed holes are narrower nowadays with the newer engines because of the thinner oil, to maintain oil pressure. Because of these narrower holes, a lot of the metal shaving from machining get stuck and don't come out as easily, leading to the current situation with the 3.4 v6.

Nothing beats a NA V8! I don't care what ANYBODY says! Toyota should have just kept their V8!

Some of the best technical automotive content on the internet right now. Keep it up. I hope you get the recognition you deserve.