Should I daily a 1998 holiday surf jdm import

So right now I drive a 23 tundra with low miles, I’m changing careers so I won’t be able to afford it anymore. After selling I’ll have about 20k in equity to buy a new car. I found this 1998 hilux surf which is basically a 1998 4Runner but with the steering wheel on the opposite side. I’m wondering if it’ll be a safe option to use as a daily. Im unsure if I should pick this up because I know the 4Runner’s from this year are reliable or if I should be looking at other things. The vehicle was brought here by a guy stationed in Japan it has 33k miles on it and from all the pictures and videos I’ve seen of it run it looks like it’s in almost perfect condition.

 

Old cars break. No matter the mileage. Mechanics might not to want to work on the Hilux as foreign cars are a pain to get parts for. They have different legal requirements so they have different lights, different computers, different sensors, etc. It's not just the steering wheel location.

I would not recommend the Hilux.

 

Agreed, RHD alone could be a huge pain depending on your use case. I'd think about what you want out of the vehicle and go from there.

 

If it has the 3.4 I would drive it.

 

So true! I spent the first 20 years of my driving life keeping old cars going. I couldn't spare the cash for someone else to do it, so I spent a lot of late nights after work in a freezing garage. As soon as one thing was fixed, another would go. Plastics gone brittle, parts available only in junkyards, it was a constant chore.

I could enjoy having a classic car for fun, but never again as a daily driver. Also, wrong-side drive gets old pretty fast.

 

I now DD a '87 4runner 90 miles round trip every day. Been doing this since August and added something like 14k miles to it since then (including the 2k mile drive home from Colorado). It has (now) a 24k mile 22RE performance motor, 24k mile Marlin trans, and is overall in excellent shape. I made sure to buy a nice example that had been maintained so hopefully I wasn't going to constantly be chasing gremlins.

 

I bought my '97 and put 40k miles in 4 years on it. Apart from large initial pre-emptive repairs it's served me without any sudden mandatory repair bills. Most of the money I put was fixing annoying little issues I could leave like oil leaks, cracked manifold, and power antenna.

The engine is important. The diesel is cool, but if you're relying on it every day the last thing you want is an engine that'll take several days to get parts for every time you need something.

I think the allure of JDM is purely driven by having something nobody else has. They have some cool things like adjustable dampers, strange spoilers, hood mirrors, and field monitors, but these luxuries do not outweigh the crap you have to put up with.

Nobody tells you that the headlights on JDM models have to be swapped since the reflectors are aimed to project light towards the shoulder of the road, which is now oncoming traffic in LHD land. Or that JDM cars have to be brought within compliance with California smog to be registered, even though the same federal emissions vehicle doesn't (California isn't the only state like this). Or that every control is reversed on Japanese vehicles, like the turn signals being to the right of the wheel. Not to mention the speedometer having no miles per hour scale what so ever.

If you're going to use this car and have JDM money, get a really good example of a 4runner instead of buying a Surf. That's the pragmatic choice.