Well, I read that whole thread and I'm even more shocked that I was before. It does appear there's some kind of defect in the mount design. Not necessarily the frame itself, but how it's attached to the frame. It does look like the frame is too weak in that area. But a larger mount or gussetts could have been added to overcome that problem.
The problem as I see in the old truck verses Taco debate, is that we used to benefit from trucks that were specificly designed for a global market, which included heavy duty commerical use overseas where many trucks never saw a paved road. Our older trucks, including the torsion bar IFS versions were commonly used overseas in applications and under conditions that we couldn't even imagine here. But the trucks were still essentially the same, even though few people in America would ever carry the same 1 ton loads off road in the middle of Australia.
Ever since the Tacoma was a North American exclusive product, that changed. But the benefit to us has been a FAR superior road truck, with more power, better handling and steering response. But the cost has been the lack of over engineering, with many parts of all of the Tacos being outsourced to manufactures, like Dana, that had nothing to do with the older trucks. Since Tacos are never intended to carry 1 ton loads or see the extreme abuse of the Hilux, they were able to skimp in some design areas. Since most of us don't "rock crawl" with our expedition rigs, it's less of an issue than people who go out and do extreme wheeling or extreme modifications.
Don't get me wrong, both the old and new Taco are still a superior rigs in almost everyway compared to the competition. If I had to buy a brand new truck, it would definately be the new Taco. And my dream rig is a prior gen Taco 4 door like Scott's. But I've just come to respect the diffence in the rigs build in Japan, like the older mini-trucks, 4Runners, Land Cruisers and the new FJ.
As far as the older trucks and frame cracking, I'm pretty sure any cracking frames is almost exclusively due to rust issues, which are pretty prevelent in certain parts of the country. The fully foxed frame doesn't help much in those situations.
One really nice thing about the Taco that I do like is that they share the same front suspension and steering as the Hilux, 4Runner, and FJ. I'm not a fan of rack and pinion steering, but Toyota has obviously found a durable IFS and steering set up if it's good enough to run on those same rigs overseas. And of course, the new Taco has an awesome engine, and transmissions.
Like I said, the new Tacos are awesome, but they could have been even better if Toyota just stuck to it's roots, instead of outsourcing the design and manufacture of so many of it's parts. Just my opinion.
I hope the engine mount issue is solved by Toyota.
