Cars: #16 - 1999 Toyota Sienna XLE

The other day I was goofing around on Wikipedia, and for some reason I bumped into the entry for the Ford Pinto, a completely little econo-car from the 70's. Perhaps more significant was that it was one of my very first cars. So I decided to make a list of all the cars that I/Kristie & I have owned. I started looking for pictures, and that's how we got here.

1999 Toyota Sienna XLE

The Landcruiser had been our primary vehicle for years, with good reason. It had been amazingly reliable..only in the shop a couple of times for minor little wear and tear issues. It was "comfortable"...okay it was kind of comfortable. The back seat worked great when the girls were in car seats and moved up from little girls. But now that they were lanky high schoolers...it was tough to imagine a long trip in the old girl. We had taken it on a camping trip down to La Veta in 2003, a long trip really, and they did okay. But Spring Break 2004, we did a trip to the Sand Dunes and it was clear that they were getting pretty squirmy. It had also been a challenge for the car to hit 75 mph on the highway, you really had plan your moves. Now it had around 100K miles (actually nothing in Cruiser years...) and it was a little tougher. Plus it was needing a little more work now and then. So it seemed that we should get something else to be our primary and relegate the trusty old car to being our 3rd car. I still had dreams of it being the girls car as it was perfect: slow, predictable and likely to win most any collision. So it was time to look for a car. And once again, it was minivan vs. SUV. But this time Kristie was a little less absolute on wanting a big SUV. The conversation went something like "that's what I want, but we probably can't have one...so make sure it's a nice minivan". So I narrowed it down to the Honda Odyssey and the Toyota Sienna, both around 5 years old as that seemed like a good spot price-wise. I decided on the Toyota for a couple of reasons: the Odyssey's were holding their value a little better, so I could get "more" in the Toyota, like leather seats and a few other gizmos for the same price. My other reasons are pretty lame in hindsight: you couldn't get a sunroof on the Honda and Toyota had one that was factory. Fair enough. But the last reason is a classic case of me over thinking things: the Odyssey had the slick "fold into the floor" rear seat. But the Sienna had the two piece, independently reclining removable seat...and somehow that seemed more "flexible" to me. So we went with the Toyota. Plus I was still very enamored with my Toyota mechanic and I didn't know one for a Honda.

It's a very nice car. The V6 was amazingly smooth, quiet and powerful. The old days of planning my moves on the highway as I did with the Cruiser were over. It had tons of power. The 4 primary seats (the middle row were two buckets) were unbelievably comfortable. We hooked up a little portable DVD player and the girls could watch DVD's on long trips. The rear seats were also very comfortable, but I quickly learned that Honda's idea of stowing them in the floor was better when we went to Yellowstone. We took a long vacation with my parents (who drove their RV) and when we wanted to go off on little side trips, we needed to have the rear seats so all six of us could travel together. So that meant that I needed the seats, but I would've loved to have the storage space when they weren't sitting there. Oh well, live and learn I guess. Maybe that's the reason that literally every minivan (and a lot of SUV types) have the stowable rear seat...it's just a great idea.

The car did have a couple of very annoying features though. For some reason, the brakes squealed. We had them looked at, by a couple of different places and they told us we were fine, no big deal. But that's the sound they make when they should be replace I would argue and then I'd get a litany of reasons, mostly that they were not Toyota branded, etc... I guess I could've had them replaced, but I couldn't get any assurity that this would fix things. So we lived with squeaky brakes. The other major issue had to do with the two sliding doors. In some sort of unknown engineering gaf (uncharacteristic for Toyota) they made this era of Sienna with a power door on the passenger side and a manual one behind the driver. In itself, not that big of a deal. But both mechanisms were so flawed it was scary. The power door would go crazy and not work, either to close or open. We could disable the power, but the way it was built, it would still have to turn the motor, so it required a herculean amount of effort to operate it. We tried "rebooting" it and many other tricks, but it was just a crappy design. And the comments all over the web agreed with us. We could have it replaced, to the tune of about five thousand bucks...no thanks. My idea was to not use that door and use the manual driver side one. It was actually worse than the power door. The lock on the door would get jammed and it wouldn't remained closed. It would take a bit of futzing with a paper clip to get it to work...a hassle to be sure. But we muddled through with the van until the spring of 2006, when it was time. I had been driving the van to work by this time, as we thought it would be better to have Kristie use the Cruiser on her meager little 3 mile commute. But the gas mileage and the overall stupidity of me driving an empty 7 passenger van to work everyday caught up to me. We sold the Landcruiser, and poured the money from it into the Sienna and traded it in on our Honda CRV.