ToyotaVanPeople.com

Hey guy I am hoping that somebody could help me or give me some words of advice on what to do. My girlfriend is looking at buying a 1993 Previa All-Trac that has 170,000 on it. The body is in very nice shape and the interior is almost perfect. The owner is selling it for $500.00 because the A/C is acting up and the exhaust coupling is worn and has a hole in it. We were checking it out and all the fluids and such looked good in it. We took it out for a test drive and there was something odd about it. I am not familiar with vehicles that are AWD so I don't know about this. When we are driving it and try to pass someone the transmission does not kick down to a lower gear so it will have passing torque. I know in my van and all my other cars that are rear wheel drive every time I try to pass someone and push the gas peddle down the transmission will kick down to a lower gear and allow the engine to rev higher and give the vehicle the needed torque to pass on the road or to give it extra pep on start off. So my question is this normal on an all-trac previa to not kick down to a lower gear when passing or is there possibly something else we should look at on the van or should we just walk away from it? Any help on this would be great because if it is a normal thing then she would like to buy it in the next couple of days. Please get back with me and let me know.

Thanks,
Paul

If you do a search, you'll see this has been talked about before. It's a fairly common problem with the higher mileage Previas. The wiring harness to the TPS gets damaged (copper breaks inside the insulation) and the signal doesn't get through to the ECU. I think there was a service bulletin on this and I believe Toyota may have even came up with a repair kit (a new sub harness). It could also be a bad TPS, but my money is on a broken wire. On mine I located the broken wire using a continuity test, cut it off at the TPS, butt connected it to new piece of wire and ran it directly to the ECU. The ECU and TPS are close together anyhow, so it was an easy fix.