My Toyota and Tacoma Web Pages
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Pages of interest to 4x4ers
My 07 Jeep Rubicon
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Unfortunately my love affair with that vehicle ended while in Germany in 1988. I wanted another Toyota, but thanks to the US Congress, I could not purchase a foreign-made vehicle through the US Armed Forces Base Exchange vehicle buy system. So I had to settle for a US-made vehicle - a 1998 Ford Ranger XLT SuperCab. I sold the Toyota to one of my friends in England and came home with the Ranger.
I sorely missed the strengths of that Toyota and vowed I would buy another one.
In 1996, I purchased a new Toyota Tacoma XtraCab 4x4. While it was a very nice truck, I missed the bucket seats (that truck was a 4-cylinder with a 60/40 split bench seat - one of the dumbest things any automotive manufacturer could install in a pick up truck!). I vowed that when the lease for that truck was up, I'd either sell it and get another Toyota - this time with buckets - or rip out that useless bench seat and replace it with buckets.
I did end up selling that truck and purchased a new Toyota Tacoma XtraCab PreRunner with a V6 engine.
Okay, so what is a PreRunner? According to Toyota, a PreRunner is
a class of vehicle used to "pre-run" an off-road race course in order to save the race
vehicle for race day. Often, these "pre-runner" vehicles are heavily modified 2WD trucks.
My PreRunner came equipped with 31" tires, stronger springs, and Bilstein shocks. And because it had the V6, it also had a locker in the rear.
More information, with pictures, about this great truck can be found on this web page. Although it was not a true 4x4, with the locker in the rear, it could go more places than a 4x2, but obviously not as many places that a 4x4 could.
The main reason for Toyota making a PreRunner available was for people like myself who either didn't want a 4x4, but needed something more than a 4x2, or those who could not afford a 4x4 - like me! I had just graduated from college and was working part-time while looking for a full-time job. And there was only 2 places in Montgomery Alabama where one could go "off-roading."
So now I had this PreRunner and was really wanting to go off-road, but not too much because it was my daily driver. While surfing around the net, I found an organization called "Tacoma Territory Off-Roader's Association"; now called "Toyota Territory Off-Roader's Association". After several e-mail exchanges with the founder, I finally convinced him that PreRunners were off-road capable - one of the requirements for belonging.
Well, to make a long story short, I ended up becoming responsible for updating their Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section of their web site. During the several years of doing so, I created numerous web pages about the Tacoma and Toyota.
After leaving that organization, I became concerned that many of the web pages I created would eventually disappear (many have!), I decided to place some of the more interesting Toyota and Tacoma FAQ web pages her on my personal website. These pages can be identified as they have the gray background.
Since 2004 I am no longer involved with TTORA and subsequently sold my PreRunner, I have not kept up with the changes in the Tacoma model lines. Most of the information on these pages is current up to and in some cases through model year 2005.
Click on any of the links on the left to see what's all here!
Frame last updated: January 17, 2009