An ignorant Toyota owner might have destroyed his flooded engine by starting it
October 9, 2024 at 17:51
- Storms are taking over the south-east USA right now and flooding is happening all over.
- Should your car end up with water in the engine there’s one key thing to avoid.
- Don’t start or let the engine run until you can drain it of all the water in the cylinders.
A Florida man tagged Toyota in a recent post to lament the loss of his father-in-law’s 2004 Tundra pickup truck. After 350,000 miles, the man blamed a storm surge that made its way into the engine on the failure. Commenters quickly pointed out that it might have been salvageable had he not started the truck.
“My father in law bought this truck new in 2004 and had 350K miles on it. Storm surge from Hurricane Helena was the only thing that could take it out. What a battle horse this truck has been. RIP,” said Brett Herrington on Facebook.
More: Hurricane Helene Destroys 672 Cars At A Single Kia Florida Dealer
Alongside the text, he posted a video of the truck spitting and sputtering as it shot water from the exhaust pipe. Audio from the clip makes it clear that something isn’t quite right in the engine. It’s unclear if the truck drove through the surge or if it just ended up literally deep enough in a flood that water found its way into the intake.
Harrington does seem to indicate that indeed, the truck sat in the water and didn’t drive through it. In a separate comment he mentions it sitting in salt water for eight hours. That info came in a response to another person saying that they would have kept the Toyota Tundra going.
“All you needed to do was drain the oil fill with new oil pull spark plugs and crank then new spark plugs in and crank it right up,” they said. Indeed, that’s a huge key here. If the vehicle is just sitting when water makes its way into the engine, it’s possible to save it without major work.
Pulling the spark plugs out provides a safe place for the water to evacuate during cranking. Swapping the oil out for fresh ensures that the engine has proper lubrication and very limited potential for contamination.
If there’s any clear lesson here it’s this; don’t start or run a car when water is in the engine. Since water is practically incompressible, it can cause catastrophic engine failure when it’s in a cylinder. It’ll bend valves and more which is a quick way to need a whole new engine as is surely the case in Herrington’s situation.