The Car Care Nut reviews the Toyota Century and its engine, the only V12 Toyota has ever made. He explains its uniqueness and its quirks and features as well as the difficulty of maintaining it.
The fact that the 2nd generation Century is very ill-suited to serve as anybody's daily driver in the West, despite it being not extremely uncommon as a fleet car in Japan, is carefully explained. While the Century is not as horrendously expensive to maintain than a Rolls-Royce, it's still a very high-end luxury car that comes with the additional difficulty that very few examples have ever ended up outside of Japan and that service manuals are hard to come by.
The Car Care Nut considers this job of fixing up the Century owned by an American collector the pinnacle of his career, exciting yet terrifying a challenge. Many of the parts of the Century are unique while some are the same as of the Lexus LS.
Examples of the Century can be bought relatively inexpensively but the problem is most Toyota specialists don't want to touch it and that all the parts need to be ordered from Japan. While Toyota has made sure they're all available, the delivery can be slow and the cost often is high.
