9th Jun 2002, 17:19

I bought a certified 1997 Toyota Avalon XLS in November of 2001 and couldn't be happier. It runs superbly and looks like it just came out of a showroom. The closest thing to a Mercedes that I could imagine. It is so quiet that it is hard to hear the engine or to discern that the car is even turned on.

I sympathize with people who bought what appear to be "lemons" but- I want to say that this has not been my experience by a long shot. This is a well-engineered car that absolutely "purrs" on the road. I LOVE this car.

23rd May 2003, 14:33

I purchased a Toyota Avalon XL 1998 model new from Houston. The car today has 57,000 miles. By no means can I say that I am a happy customer. I have had my share of problems over the past 5 years that I owned it. During the early part of the cars life ie first two years, I had problems with the steering column and steering wheel slip. This took about 4 trips to the dealership before it finally got resolved. Next I started to have an annoying hum in the muffler on acceleration. This problem was never identified by Toyota. I finally located this problem after a detailed inspection at Midas Muffler. They say a baffle inside the muffler is vibrating. At 35000 miles I had a smoke problem followed by engine sludge problem. Toyota claimed it was poor maintenance on my part. After a lot of correspondence with Toyota, arbitration and finally after joining a Toyota Avalon users group that was fighting for the same issue with Toyota we finally got Toyota to admit that their 3.0L engines did have problems. They finally rebuilt my whole engine at 50000 miles at their cost. I paid over 27000 for this car. I think this model of Toyota is not worth the money they charge for it. Those that have had good luck with it are just lucky.