2000 Trans Status 2011 Update (8 Viewers)

[OregonLC]

Thanks for the replies, keep 'em coming guys. We're 0 for 14 right now.

 

[hkeller]

2000 LX470 - 155K miles. 2nd owner. Drained and filled by me 3 times. Everything running as it should.

 

[wareagle]

Thanks for the replies, keep 'em coming guys. We're 0 for 14 right now.

You got to hit 998 before they are built the "Toyota way".

 

[NW Oil]

2000 Land Cruiser, built in the late 1999, it has around 149K miles. The transmission fluid was replaced by the dealer when I purchased the vehicle, in 2007 at 118K miles. I am the second owner and can't tell if the transmission is original, or it was previously repaired, or replaced. The transmission does feel kind of "weak" and does not shift as smooth, as the ones in the latest trucks, but it did not not require any corrective maintenance since I owned it.

 

[re_guderian]

This will be LONG and full of data, so go get some coffee or Red Bull or something...

Soooo... After my whining rant yesterday in Brett's 2002 tranny thread, I thought I should atone by sharing some data on 100 series transmission failures. I culled through all the threads here on the board with tranny failures, and then estimated some other data to get what we all really want - an estimate of the likelihood of a MY 2000 (+/-1) failure rate. There are a few assumptions, most pretty good ones (I think, because I made them ) involved in this calculation, but I'll walk you all through them so you can decide for yourself. BTW, I'm a numbers geek by trade (BS,MS in Statistics). I'd be glad to send out the spreadsheets to anyone who is interested. The analysis isn't complete, as there's a lot of work left to do on the reliability estimate side but, oh well, here it goes...





Executive Summary:

1. If you own a MY 2000 LC/LX, you're ~6x more likely to suffer a transmission failure than those in other years - 3.7% chance for 2000's v. 0.618% for the other years.
2. If you believe that the faulty transmissions were not limited to 2000, but spilled into 1999 and 2001, you're even more at risk.
3. By my estimates - detailed below - posters on the MUD 100 series section accounts for about 1% of the US market for LC/LX sales.
4. We see fewer failures in LX's than in LC's even though sales of both were about the same in 2000. Could be due to original purchasers not being in the wheeling crowd, and/or having trannies replaced under warranty? <- speculation on my part... In MY 2000, LC and LX sales were about equal, yet the reported failure rate on MUD is 7:1 LC v LX.
5. Conventional wisdom on this board says that if you have a 2000 LC/LX, or are looking to buy one, and you haven't experienced a failure by XXX,XXX miles - usually around 120,000 or whatever the rig's mileage that the poster is asking about - then you're in the clear. Not so. 25% of the failures happened after 125,000 miles, 50% after 100K.

Details





The Failures

1. I combed through all the tranny failure poll threads, the combined threads, and searched the entire forum for keywords of transmission, tranny, fail, failed, dump, crap, tow, etc. etc. and kept a master list of those that reported failures removing duplicate entries. I captured Year, Type (LC/LX), Mileage at failure and Username.
2. Total came out to 23 relevant failures. I removed 4 MY 2000 failures that were from folks who seem to have solely posted on MUD to inquire about their busted trannies, and one European VX100 tranny failure from Denmark.
3. I excluded the TD 100 failues from AUS, as they have a different tranny and their own TSB. I also deleted 3 as they turned out to be axle/diff related. I didn't include BrettinSanAntonio's as his is yet unvalidated. ('02?). Nor did I include a few European failures due to not having other relevant data for them, but they were only one or two.
4. I'm certainly not claiming this is the end-all, be-all list, just what I could do in an hour of searching, so feel free to add/delete/debate, whateva...
5. Production date data is so sparse as to be useless, though the username list could be pinged for more details via PM, I guess - I didn't use it, or even attempt to collect it.
6. Trannies failed anywhere from 52K to 200K, with the densest group of failures between 75K and 125K, however half were over 100K when they went. Mileage estimates are probably +/- 5K based on some members reporting many different, but approximately the same mileages for their failures in different threads.
7. Based on anecdotal accounts of the failures, there is rarely, if ever, any warning of impending doom, and you could buy Mobil 1 transmission fluid by the truck load and swap it every weekend and still have the failure (OK, just a slight exageration, but it was an equal mix of religious PM and unknown PO history).
8. All failures were 1999-2002, with the vast majority (15/23) in MY 2000. No failures reported on the 5-sp tranny (is that right?).
9. I feel this failure data is probably pretty sound and complete (not underreported), as later years likely have significantly lower ownership (as does '98 due to lack of dual life-support and known diff issues putting off used buyers and buyers of the trucks when new likely having moved on). I'll get to distribution of Model Year on MUD later.
10. Are we over-reporting? Tough to tell without Toyota opening up the books. Do people join just to bitch about a failed tranny? Could be. But people also join MUD to NOT bitch about a tranny too. Purely based on speculation of reading all the posts, we might have a slightly over-represented failure rate, but it would certianly not diminish the stark difference between MY 2000 and other years. The tranny failure has risen up to bite many long-time members as well.
    • Next step. I guess I could validate this by seeing of the 28 failues, how many owners had their first post be the one about a tranny failure? Those might be candidates for "over-reporting". Complete, and numbers adjusted for those that were not MUD users before their transmission failure.

So? Now we know how many failed, but out of how many that are "sampled" here on MUD (where our sample comes from?)





The MUD Population

1. The key now is to find out what number to divided the 15 MY 2000 tranny failure by to get a failure rate. Some Mod help would be nice, but I'm not sure that BB stats would directly support what we need, so I didn't bother asking Trunk Monkey - that's probably a next step. PM Sent...
2. So I did the next best thing and that was to get a justifiable estimate. To do this I did the following (which isn't that hard to do)
   • Sampled 33 randomly chosen threads in the 100 series forum.
   • Determined how many unique posters were in each thread (by clicking on the post-count link on the main page for each thread)
   • Determined how many incremental unique posters were added for each additional thread examined. Eventually, even though a thread may have 5, 20 or 40 posts, it only adds a few new unique posters ID'd via their username in the thread summary.
   • Take these 33 threads and build a model on them, then use that model to estimate how many unique user ID's would be contained in the forum with it's current 10K-ish threads.
   • That number came out to be about 1800. It was a little higher, but I rounded down to the nearest 100
     1. just for kicks
     2. round numbers are easier to see in summaries
     3. there are a few posters in the 100 forum that either don't own 100's, or are outside the US.
3. This number could use validating, but it "feels" about right. That works out to just under 1% of all the LC/LX's sold in the US from '98-'07. Based on my own anectdotal observations of "built" rigs, and the rejections I get from my cruiser-waves, it just feels about right.
4. Based on removal of 4 "casual" MUD users with tranny failures, I guess I should have changed this number to 1796, but screw-it, there's enough slop in this number that I'm not redoing it.

So, now we know how many 100 owners are on MUD, and how many failures we've seen, we're good, right? Not quite...






The Distribution of Model Years within MUD

1. Short of pinging a ton of member to get a sample, I just assumed that to start with, the MUD MY ownership distribution followed the Toyota/Lexus sales patterns by year, which Hoser has posted on here and is included in the table. Some general trends:
   • Early years account for the bulk of the US LC/LX sales, and they drop about 50% in 2001 (Sequoia effect?).
   • From 2001 onwards, LX's outsold LC's, sometimes by almost 2:1 - except 2007.
2. I then made a manual arbitrary adjustment to this based on my personal experience. I called this the "MUD Cheapskate Adjustment". Basically, a TON of us here, myself included, didn't buy our 100's brand new off the lot. When we got 100's, they were 1,2, 5, or ten years old. We tended to gravitate towards the older models since they were cheaper and more readily available on the used market. So I took the sales numbers, and left the '98's alone due to the aforementioned reasons (sorry guys), Bumped the '99's up by 5%, the 2000's up by 6% (for diff and ATRAC upgrades), the '01's up by 4% and left the '02 alone. I then adjusted the '03-'07's down by 3% a year from the sales figures to compensate.
   • The upshot of this is that I assumed that the 100 owners on MUD are more skewed to the older rigs and less representative of the newer ones than Toyota's figures might represent.
   • Again, I can't "prove" this, but if feels like a good and relevant adjustment to make.

So How 'bout Them Failure Rates?

1. So, for MY 2000 then, we have 15 observed failues. And of the 1800 MUD 100 series forum posters (I'm assuming this = "owners), we have 22.5% of them owning MY 2000 LC and LX's. This v. 16.5% based on straight Toyota sales numbers (which would make the failure rate worse ). My "adjustment" gives the nod to a lower failure rate. Based on these assumptions, I would estimate approximately 405 MY 2000 owners on MUD. With 15 failures. Just under 4%. (3.71%).
2. MY 2001 is next highest at 1.68% failure rate, 2002 at 1.27%, and 1999 with 0.47%. Are these the same failure mode responsible? Only Toyota knows, and they aren't telling. However, when you look at the number of owners for 2001/2, they drop off pretty fast. '99 has more than '00, but not by much. Cypher's 2002 failure may or may not be the same underlying root cause. I left it in. Since it's not a MY 2000 it doesn't really change the story, in or out.

Conclusions

1. Based on MUD sampling, which is arguably the best non-corporate data you're gonna get, MY 2000 has a much greater risk (statistically significant) of tranny failure, with the best guess at around 3.7% failure rate to-date. This is a ~2.5-7x increase over neighboring years - 0.47% for '99 and 1.7% for '01.
2. MY 2000 trannies can fail at a wide range of mileages, usually without warning. There is no real "safety" zone in terms of mileage, only in terms of when Toyota rectified the problem in terms of production and stock consumption.
3. MUD represents about 1% of US LC/LX's.
4. This is a clear black-eye for Land Cruiser reliability. Sucks that Toyota won't publish at least a TSB on it for VIN# ranges. They have to know based on core returns (which I assume are overwhelmingly done through dealerships) where the problems lie. If the assumptions here hold, Toyota should have seen about 1120 blown LC/LX trannies from 2000 LC/LX in the US. Would be interesting if Beno/CDan could view what typical inventory is for rebuilds, and if the consumption rate validates this. Failures should have started around 2004-ish to present.
5. This won't keep me from wheeling my rig in the boondocks, but Toyota, if you're listening, IT SHOULD!!!!

Some screen shots of the spreadsheet and graphs. Like I said, i'd be glad to share with anyone, and if you know of failues that aren't on here, by all means, speak up.

 

[2000UZJ]

Type - 20000 LC
Current Miles-148,985
Build date- 5/00
Status- Good condition, shifts rough somedays but silky smooth majority of the time.
History- Original Fluid, no changing, no towing or heavy loads. Has been abused offroad with lots of stop go driving in city. Driven hard.

 

[hkeller]

Ah, re_guderian, what can I say, that is one serious post . . . holly molly . . . nice work.

 

[OregonLC]

I'm not sure if that makes me feel better or worse! Nice job re_gud! That was exactly what I had hoped to do with this post. Thanks for doing the heavy lifting. It will take me a re-read later to get it all digested.

A couple of thoughts:

1) Time (in miles) appears to be on your side. The curve leans to the left of 100k. Looks to me like if it's going to fail, it's likely to happen prior to 125k. Although this may change as the aggregate population of 100's continues to age.

2) What do we do with the data? Worry more? Stay close to the mall? Upgrade to an A750 vehicle? This is like watching a show about the dangers of skin cancer; makes me never want to go outside. So I'm at roughly 83k. I could upgrade to an 03/04 for about $6k in cash or I could stash that money, buy a few nice recovery tools and hope for the best. By your data, I have a 1:20 shot of needing to spend +/- $3,500 in the next 2-3 years. The 04 would have a nice 5spd, 18" LC wheels, and better/worse Nav with rear cam and maybe RES.


edit: how valid is the population data for the 2000 MY? your 5:1 statement got me thinking. if you look at just the LX subset then the 2000 failure rate is in line with all A343F years. is there perhaps a polarizing force that draws a MUD member to LC's? how many of the reported failures are 'senior' members vs people with their first post an trans problem?

 

[re_guderian]

2) What do we do with the data? ... By your data, I have a 1:20 shot of needing to spend +/- $3,500 in the next 2-3 years.

Well, there you have it. There is never a good time to have a $3.5K repair but most have failed close to home, or close to tow capabilities. I look at it this way. In order for worst case scenario, I'd have to be wheeling when it fails. Tranny load doesn't seem to affect it, so the probability of a failure seems to be pretty independent of activity - like wheeling or towing. I've put roughly 30K on my rig in 2 years. I've logged some miles off road - just did 20 miles Monday - but all told, my "in the boondocks" time is a small percentage of my total miles, maybe 2% by mileage, realistically. So I'm still facing 5% chance of a $3.5K repair, but only a (0.05)*(0.02)=.001 or 0.1% chance of a long hike before the $3.5K repair. Not what I expect from Toyota, but not up to the Chrysler level yet.

edit: how valid is the population data for the 2000 MY? your 5:1 statement got me thinking. if you look at just the LX subset then the 2000 failure rate is in line with all A343F years. is there perhaps a polarizing force that draws a MUD member to LC's?

We're stingy?

...how many of the reported failures are 'senior' members vs people with their first post an trans problem?

Working on that now.

 

[re_guderian]

OK, to answer the question of "how many people just pop up on MUD as disgruntled web surfers to report a tranny failure?" - the answer is very few. I went back through the post history of the failures and excluded 4 MY 2000 failures as ones that might be "over-reported" - i.e. non-MUDers that join and post just to get info about their tranny. They more likely belong to the general population of LC/LX owners, not MUDers. I also excluded one VX 100 '99 that was from Denmark that I missed first time around. It's a gasser with the A343F (I think), but since our sales data is only from the US, I let it go. New numbers attached. I don't think it changes the conclusions much. Relative to the rest of the years the risk is largely the same, and the overall failure rate dropped to 3.7% from the previous estimate of 4.7%. I'll edit previous to avoid confusion before someone (god forbid) quotes it...

 

[OregonLC]

could the 5:1 ratio be that in the pre-MUD population LC's are a) more likely to see trail time or b) more likely to see a load (gear/trailer) in their years prior to MUD membership? if so there could be a positive correlation between heavy use and failure rate. and at least one of my PO's had a trailer brake. great.

 

[lizardking100]

Holy hell Re_gud.

 

[re_guderian]

could the 5:1 ratio be that in the pre-MUD population LC's are a) more likely to see trail time or b) more likely to see a load (gear/trailer) in their years prior to MUD membership? if so there could be a positive correlation between heavy use and failure rate. and at least one of my PO's had a trailer brake. great.

Yeah, I don't know about that. All my numbers I lumped the LC/LX's together. There "could" be a difference, but AFAIK they use the exact same transmission, no? And I get the "feeling" with no data to back it up, that there ARE more LC owners on MUD than LX owners. If we can prove that, can we vote to kick Loud off the island??

 

[OregonLC]

Yeah, I don't know about that. All my numbers I lumped the LC/LX's together. There "could" be a difference, but AFAIK they use the exact same transmission, no? And I get the "feeling" with no data to back it up, that there ARE more LC owners on MUD than LX owners. If we can prove that, can we vote to kick Loud off the island??

Same trans, but in their 'puritan' (pre-MUD) years I would think it 10x more likely that an LX would be found at the mall rather than pulling a utility trailer. Just trying to see if there is some underlying correlation between use and failure.

 

[scottm]

Toyota sent a specialist to analyze the vibration in my '03, he was quick to decide it needed a new torque converter, which turned out to have nothing to do with the vibration. I wondered why they were so quick to pick that and to go with it without much real evidence. Does Toyota think there's a problem?

 

[schlite60]

i have a 2000 LX470 just bought with 158K when I went in to have another key made the Seattle Lexus dealer I need to have a tranny flush burnt smell to the fluid ( maybe)(240 dollars please). I will flush and change tranny filter and as fluid (replace with Amsoil ATF) as I can when I do that very soon. I am the 4th owner and so far so good; Po I do not think it was abused; this one it does not have very much maintenance history with Lexus. BTW i have a 94 LC with 279K and the original tranny (amsoil atf) in it A442F.

 

[TheFuzz]

Wow, you guys are awesome. Great info here. Just in case you still want/need it:

2000 LC
~140,000
Build date 09/00
Status: Good, original trans. Shifts fine, typical driveline thunk going from R-D and vice versa, typical t-case whining when cold (dissipates when warmed up, usually after one-two minutes of driving)
History: I am either the 3rd or 4th owner (need to dig up the carfax). Spent most of it's life in the rustbelt in a Chicago suburb. Made it's way down to auction in Phoenix, where the dealer bought it. I bought it from the dealer while it was still on the truck on it's way up to CO thinking that it was a rust free SW truck...

 

[pman]

2000 LX
1315XX miles
Built 06/00
Original Trans, no issues, dealer serviced on regular intervals.

Been wheeled a little, however tows a 5500 boat and gets driven hard regularly

 

[Brock]

2000LX 158,000....third owner....full service records. Replaced R&P in both diffs but nothing in tranny. Getting a boat next year that will be about 2000lbs so will find out I guess if I am borderline or not.

 

[hifu]

3rd party buy last year......i changed out all liquids and tranny has been fine. Truck in excellent condition... Just that annoying manifold tic.tic.tic.