At least until the last 10 years people would try and sell Toyota on safety and reliability. People who wanted to extract every cent out of the cars life would get a toyota because it would legit go the distance without failure. Dealer told me that it doesnt hold true anymore due to electronics. But old corollas are still legendarily reliable first cars for teenagers. And I recall the used market for old hiluxes is beyond belief.
I'm only in my thirties, but I've been hearing this exact (!) sentence, about every single brand, throughout my entire life. Surprisingly, most of the brands are still fine and selling cars.
I keep hearing that too and it feels like a huge attribution error: the cars die because of the electronics because they are the new component with the shortest lifespan, so people blame them. Yet people fail to notice that the longevity of cars is on average, trending up while the amount of electronics in them has exploded. And it makes sense if you think about it for more than a second: which would you rather die first, the cheap electronic board/sensor or the expensive mechanical part?
My theory is that a lot of auto mechanics are very mechanically minded, so if the problems start being electrical they don't have the equipment or the skill set to solve the issue beyond simple power.
I saw a video the other day where a Ram truck was having issues on the CAN bus after driving 33 miles and would settle down after 10-15 minutes. The tech was pretty much stumped and pretty much only figured it out by brute force. A capacitor on one of the CAN terminators failed making its capacitance higher than spec and screwed up the filtration harmonics after charging for those 33 miles.
There's also two sides to "reliable" where either it's simple to fix or never breaks down. Always keep that in mind whenever someone is talking about reliability because it's never obvious which definition someone has in mind.
Eh tbh I think "electronics" is code for "DPF" tbh. Hiluxes had to be recalled to be fitted with a DPF manual burn toggle from memory, or they would just hit a wall and die.
Second hard markets for second hand cars a little bit different, reliable cars end up having higher loyalty through selection bias since they simply exist longer though.
Toyota doesn't really make money on a Hilux after the first sale though.
