I briefly owned an 03 last year — picked it up for 3 grand with 175k or so miles on it. I thought it seemed like a decent deal since it had the 5 speed, was in solid shape, and had relatively low miles for the year.
Unfortunately it ended up being a disaster. I couldn’t drive it more than 30 minutes without it breaking down. It ended up overheating the first time I took it up to a trailhead. The meahcnic said it was just the radiator cap, but I was skeptical since I continued to see bubbles in the overflow tank after that after it got warmed up.
Later on, the power steering suddenly went out and nearly took me off the road. Luckily it was just on a quite back road, but it could’ve ended badly. When I opened the hood, the tensioner was spewing metal flakes everywhere.
It also had an exhaust leak at the manifolds. When I looked into that, the only fix was Doug Thorley headers ($$$) or replacing with OEM, which would likely crack again in the next few years due to the inherently flawed design. And it also had the infamous knock sensor code.
At this point, I cut my losses for $1100. Never really got much use out of it unfortunately, but it just didn’t seem worth putting any money into.
I know it’s an old truck, and it’s my fault for overpaying and not doing my homework, but it actually felt pretty solid on the test drive, and the consensus online seemed to be that they were pretty reliable, with 300k miles not unheard of with basic maintenance. However, mine turned out to be a steaming pile.
Is this typical of the first gens at their advanced age, or did I just get unlucky?