See Inside A Toyota Camry Four-Cylinder Engine With 300,000 Miles

Very few people keep their cars for 300,000 miles. Even fewer people spend money fixing a car with that kind of mileage and a serious oil-burning problem. But the owner of this 2009 Toyota Camry is one of those rare people, which is why they walked into The Car Care Nut's repair shop.  

This Toyota Camry is rare as well. On the outside, it may look like every other beige, four-cylinder Camry manufactured in 2009, but it's one of the few cars from that year equipped with a manual transmission. According to The Car Care Nut, the owner wanted a manual transmission, found this car in Florida, and drove it back to Illinois. Since then, they've kept meticulous records on the car. The largest expense for 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 on this Camry. Everything about the car indicates it's well cared for. In addition to religious maintenance, it's clean, the paint shines, and it has all of its hubcaps. But if the owner was so meticulous with maintenance, what happened to the engine, causing it to burn oil? Is it just used up after 300,000 miles?  

According to The Car Care Nut, the oil burning problem is not due to the engine's age but bad piston rings. Toyota's 2AZ-FE 2.4-liter four-cylinder had oil-burning issues from the beginning. It issued a technical service bulletin addressing the problem, which affected other Toyota and Scion models, as well as the 2007 to 2011 Camry.

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. It may seem strange to put a new/rebuilt engine in a fourteen-year-old Camry with 300,000 miles. The cost of the repair job would make a nice down payment on a new Nightshade Special Edition Camry. But if rowing the gears on a manual transmission Camry is your thing, where else would you find a replacement?