The Engine That Slowly Ate Itself — and Still Refused to Die

A 2009 Camry hit 491,000 km with a 2AZ-FE that burned oil from a factory ring defect — yet the teardown showed a surprisingly healthy engine.

A 2009 Toyota Camry landed on the teardown bench with 305,000 miles — roughly 491,000 km. The strangest part isn’t the mileage itself, but the fact that the 2AZ-FE engine spent all those years running with a factory piston-ring defect, slowly eating itself alive.

Mechanic The Car Care Nut pulled the engine and tore it down. The culprit was the low-tension piston rings Toyota fitted to these engines in the late 2000s. Over time they coked up, the cylinder walls polished almost to a mirror finish, and oil consumption climbed to about one liter every 240 km.

For many engines, that’s a straight road to a seizure. But inside this Camry the picture was different: the crankshaft was nearly scratch-free, the rod bearings showed only light surface wear, and the camshafts and cylinder head were in good shape. The real trouble was concentrated around the piston assembly, not the whole engine.

The owner held onto the car for a reason. Back in 2009 he drove from Illinois to Florida specifically to buy one of the last manual-transmission Camrys sold in the US. Over 491,000 km, total ownership costs came to $67,000, with almost half of that going to fuel. The repair — a new Toyota short block, updated pistons and labor — ran just over $5,000.

The car averaged close to 30 miles per gallon, or roughly 7.8 l/100 km. Against the price of anything new, this Camry wasn’t old junk to its owner but a known quantity with a documented history and its main weakness already cured.