So McGrinnan, I love my Land Cruiser. I currently don't have a garage and I travel for work 80% of the time, so I'm not in the best position for a project car. With that said, My wife loves it more than I do. You have to understand, I have abused the crap out of this truck over 10 years. The interior is embarrassingly bad. My teenagers have hit a tree, large boulders, a Rav4, and a Camry with it...now a concrete barrier. And what does it do? It just keeps serving. It doesn't matter that I change the oil a couple times a year whether it needs it or not (I never used sea foam and I only used cheap synthetic blends), that the last time I baselined the fluids was 5 years ago, that my kids crawled through the windows instead of opening the doors for years, that I never did the blue fan clutch mod even though I knew I should have, that I let a local shop work on it even though I knew they weren't familiar with Land Cruisers and they re-installed 80 series brakes instead of the 100 series that had worn out. It didn't matter that I never cleared the sunroof drain holes, installed an LED dome light, a 2nd battery, or a roof top tent. I didn't have the ARB bumper (which may have solved THIS problem) and the antenna still doesn't move. None of that mattered to Ed.
He gave me over 100,000 miles in 10 years, took us to amazing places, enabled fantastic adventures, embarrassed Jeeps and trucks along the way, and just kept running and running strong. Yeah, I got stuck a couple of times, but nothing that stacking a few rocks or using my hi-lift wouldn't solve. And I did stupid well. I baja-d across the Utah desert, ignored bow waves, exceeded tipping angles, went crazy places alone (with my SPOT tracker), drove down ATV trails...I ripped the fender flares off in 2 separate incidents (and never replaced them). The real reason I haven't been on mud for so long? The pressure to be a loving Land Cruiser parent was greater than my will to do so and I felt guilty every time I got on. I couldn't confess my abuse to the board. I'm a bad LC owner. One of the worst maybe. But that doesn't mean I didn't love him.
But, as with most parental relationships, my wife loved him more. I tried a few times over the years to "upgrade" from Ed. The gas mileage is abysmal! At more than $4 a gallon anything would have been more economical! The seats were missing the leather and the top layer of foam! The interior door handles had broken and the wires were dangling! You had to guess which switch operated the window you wanted to roll down! My daughter blew the speakers and I had a bad ground somewhere so the radio crackled. I mean, come on!! But no. When I bought a 2008 Honda Odyssey for road trips and better gas mileage, my wife would leave it parked in the driveway and drive Ed. When we traded that in and got a 2009 Accord, again for MPG, it just sat in the driveway and she would drive Ed. He smelled like a camel fart!! She STILL preferred the LC! Saturday I brought home a 2016 4Runner. She got in, adjusted the mirrors, and said, "The visibility isn't very good, is it?". She drove it through the snow in the neighborhood. "Hm. It does OK in the snow, not great...The turning radius is OK. Not as tight as Ed." She ran over a curb. "Doesn't handle very well, does it?" Her final assessment: "No thanks. Find me another Ed."
I always wanted to fix everything and make him like new. Every time I climbed in all I saw was my next project and no time or place to do it. It was guilt. So much so that I didn't even want to drive it any more. But every time I did, I smiled in spite of myself.
My new sig line might be: "The 80: The truck that does stupid well." If I'm not in a position to fix Ed because of my circumstances, I'm pretty certain we'll be adding a new 80 to the herd. His name will be Ned (New Ed).
