We Tested the Toyota, Honda & Nissan V6 After 200,000 Miles

Everybody knows the Toyota is bulletproof, the Honda is reliable, and the Nissan is junk. But after 20 years under these three V6 engines past 200,000 miles, I can tell you it is almost backwards. The one everybody throws away is the one I would buy. Here is what actually holds up. Let's start with the Toyota because it is the one wearing the halo. The 2GR is the V6 that ran in the Camry, the Highlander, the Avalon, the Sienna, and half the Lexus lineup. And I will hand it credit right up front. The bottom end on this engine is the real deal. It has a forged steel crankshaft, forged connecting rods, and a timing chain down low instead of a rubber belt. So there is nothing in there waiting to snap and grenade the motor. There is one more quiet advantage too. The older 2GR sprays its fuel into the intake ports, right onto the back of the intake valves. That keeps them washed clean, so you skip the baked on carbon problem the direct injection engines fight. I have seen these cross 300,000 miles with nobody ever opening the bottom end. And I had a Highlander roll into my bay last year sitting at 448,000 on the original block. That is not a typo and it is not a miracle. That is just how Toyota built the guts of this thing. So the legend is earned, but it is earned down low. Because the second you climb up out of that bottom end, the 2GR starts handing you bills. On the engines built through early 2008, Toyota ran an oil feed line to the variable valve timing gear that had a rubber section right in the middle, sitting where the hot engine cooks it. That rubber goes brittle, opens up a pinhole, and then it lets go. And when it lets go, it does not just leak a little, it dumps your entire oil supply onto the pavement in about 30 seconds, with no warning light to give you a heads up. Toyota ran a service campaign on close to a million V6 trucks and sedans over this exact part. I watched one of these lines blow on a customer Avalon at 45,000 miles, and the engine was already cooked by the time he coasted to the shoulder. Now the replacement hose Toyota handed out in that campaign was still rubber, and some of those went on to fail all over again. The real fix, the one I put on every one of these that comes through my shop, is the all metal pipe that Toyota was already using on the Lexus versions. The part is about $23. $23 to keep your bulletproof Toyota from emptying its oil onto the freeway. If you own one of these, pop the hood, look behind the oil fill cap, and if there is rubber on that line, swap it before you drive another mile. That is the cheapest insurance I will ever hand you on this channel. But the oil line is not the only soft spot. The front timing cover on the 2GR is sealed with silicone, and on a lot of them, it starts leaking oil somewhere past 100,000 miles. A small leak, you just keep an eye on. But when it needs a real reseal, that cover is buried deep, and on the front wheel drive models, the engine basically has to come out to reach it. I have written that job up at $2,600 on the low end, and a dealer will hit you for five or 6,000. On the engine, everybody swears is maintenance-free. And while you are adding up what all this costs, the water pump is a wear item on these, and on the hybrid Highlander, the factory actually wants the engine pulled to change it, which is insane for a water pump. The variable timing solenoid is another $300 to $400 item when it acts up, and the ignition coils are a when, not an if. None of that is scary money on its own. It just keeps adding up on the engine you were told would never ask you for anything. And there is one more, and it is the newest, so almost nobody warns you about it. The updated 2GR that arrived around 2017, the one in the newer Tacoma and Highlander, went to direct injection and came with a piston that has tiny oil drain holes that gum up and plug up. When they plug, the oil rings seize and the cylinder walls get scratched up. There are teardowns of these knocking at 69,000 miles. Toyota quietly redrew that piston in 2018, which tells you everything you need to know about whether they were aware of it. So the bulletproof badge has a crack in it, and the crack is sitting in the engine that is still rolling off the lot today. So my honest read on the Toyota is this. The inside of the older one is the strongest bottom end in this entire comparison, and nothing else here touches it out to a quarter million miles. But it is not the no-maintenance tank the badge promises. That oil line is a real danger until you fix it, and the newest version is one I would check inside with a camera before I trusted a dime to it. So the Toyota wins on the inside and nickels you on the outside. Hang onto that because the Honda flips the whole thing around. The Honda has good guts too. But then Honda went and found a way to wreck it on purpose. The J35 is Honda's 3.5 V6, and it lived in the Pilot, the Odyssey, the Accord, the Ridgeline, and the Acura MDX. On paper, it is a great motor. Strong rotating assembly, solid design, the kind of engine that should shrug off 300,000 miles. But somewhere in there, the fuel economy department got their hands on it and bolted on a feature called Variable Cylinder Management, VCM for short, which I am pretty sure stands for very costly mistake. In my opinion, it is the single dumbest thing Honda ever did to a good engine. Here is what it actually does. To squeeze out a little better mileage, VCM shuts down a bank of cylinders when you are cruising on the highway. Sounds clever on a brochure, but those dead cylinders are still pumping up and down with their valves clamped shut. And that pumping drags oil straight past the piston rings. Do that for 60, 80, 100,000 miles, and the rings glaze over and the engine starts drinking oil. I have seen these put away a full quart every 1,000 miles, and Honda had the nerve to put that in writing as normal consumption, and it does not end at oil. That burning oil fouls the spark plugs, and it tends to hammer the same cylinders every time, so you get misfires that drive people crazy. The oil cooks, the catalytic converters, and Honda cats run you $2,000 and up, sometimes a long way up. And the whole engine shaking on dead cylinders chews through the motor mounts, which on these are filled with fluid and like to fail on their own anyway. One feature, and it comes after your rings, your plugs, your cats, and your mounts all at once. It got so bad, Honda caught a class action lawsuit over it. Around 1 1⁄2 million vehicles. They settled and stretched the warranty out to eight years on the oil burning fix. But here is the part that makes me grind my teeth down to nubs. Honda never once admitted VCM was the cause. They changed the piston rings back in 2014, and that change did not actually fix the oil burning. What it did was shove the problem far enough down the road that most of those trucks were out of warranty by the time it showed its face. I had a pilot in my shop last spring, 200,000 miles, and the owner asked me flat out if Honda built it wrong. I had to tell him no, they built it right, then added a part whose entire job is to wear it out. He did not love that answer. I do not blame him. But here is where I save you $4,000, so stick with me. When one of these limps in with a fouled cylinder, the dealer wants $3,500 to $4,200 to tear it down and re-ring it, and closer to $6,000 if the bores are already scored. You do not have to play that game. There is a little controller, people call it a VCM disabler, runs you somewhere between $100 and $300, and it fools the computer so the cylinders never shut off in the first place. Plug it in, the engine runs on all six all day long, and the oil burning stops getting worse. I have got a customer who put a disabler on early and just rolled past 300,000 miles laughing. That little part is the line between a Honda that dies at 150,000 and one that just keeps going forever. If you caught the video I did on engines that are great until one cheap part quietly kills them, the J35 is the poster child for that whole list. One more thing people forget on these, and for once, it is not VCM. The J35 runs a timing belt, not a chain, and it is an interference engine, which is mechanic talk for this. If that belt snaps, the valves and pistons meet, and the engine is scrap. Honda wants it changed every seven years, or 105,000 miles, water pump included. Skip it to save a few hundred dollars, and you can turn a running engine into a boat anchor in one afternoon. I have watched it happen, and it is a brutal way to learn the lesson. And do not think this is only an old engine headache. The newer direct injection J35 earned its own black eye. In 2023, Honda recalled nearly 250,000 of the newer trucks because their crankshaft pins were ground the wrong size, which wears out the rod bearings and locks the engine solid. And then the federal investigators opened a separate look in 2024 into a pile more of them that were not even part of that recall after thousands of failure reports came in. So the Honda VI-6 is a strong engine wrapped around two different ways of killing itself, one old, one new. So my take on the Honda is rough, and I will stand on it all day. The engine underneath is good. What Honda strapped to it is not, and you should never buy one of these without either a disabler already on it or a firm plan to bolt one on the day you drive it home. Now, let me tell you why the engine everybody calls garbage is the one I would actually put my own money on. The Nissan 3.5 is the VQ35, and it ran in the Maxima, the Altima, the Murano, the Pathfinder, the 350Z, and the Infiniti G35. It has a reputation as an oil burner, as junk, as proof Nissan lost its way. And for the early version, that reputation is mostly fair. So let me be straight about the bad one first. The early VQ35, the one they call the DE, had two problems stacked right on top of each other. One, the factory piston rings were weak, and the cylinders were not bored quite straight. So a lot of these drank oil from early in their lives. Two, the little catalytic converters sit up close to the engine, and the ceramic honeycomb inside them crumbles and gets pulled back up into the cylinders, where it scratches the walls like somebody poured sand down the intake. Whether it is mostly the rings or mostly that cat debris, mechanics still argue about it to this day, but the result is the same. These things burn oil. And the worst of the bunch, the high-output manual cars from 2005 and 2006, would go through a court every couple hundred miles. Nissan ended up replacing whole engines on some of those under a service bulletin. I had a 350Z come through years back that was running a quart low between oil changes, and the owner had no clue because there was no light on the dash, just a little smoke he could not see trailing behind him. So yes, the early one earned every bit of its bad name. But here is the twist, and this is the hill I will die on. In 2007, Nissan reworked this engine into the version they call the HR, and the HR is a completely different animal. They put proper timing control on the exhaust side, opened up the exhaust, fixed those rings, and beefed up the block, and the HR does not burn oil. Go read the owner forms for the later cars, and the guys with these engines are not even having the oil conversation. The same engine family everybody writes off as trash, quietly turned into one of the better V6 engines of its era, and almost nobody bothered to update their opinion. I would take a clean VQ35 HR over a Honda Pilot with VCM any day of the week, and I already know that one sentence just made somebody slam their keyboard. Go ahead, fight me in the comments. I have been waiting 20 years to say it out loud, and give the VQ its due on design while we are here. It runs three timing chains and that forged crank, and the valves are set with little shims that Nissan likes checked around every 60,000 miles, though in the real world, they usually stay quiet far longer than that. I had a Maxima come in not long ago with 260,000 miles on an HR, original engine, and the owner adds a quart maybe twice a year, and thinks that is a lot. That is the engine people are scrolling right past at the auction, because a relative had a bad one back in 2003. Their loss is your bargain. Now the HR is not flawless, so here is your buying tip. Behind the timing cover, there are some thin oil gallery gaskets that warp and let your oil pressure drop, and that is the one thing on this engine that can truly hurt it. The steel replacement gaskets cure it for good, and they are cheap. And on any VQ, the timing chain guides and tensioners start rattling on cold starts somewhere past 150,000 miles, which is a refresh, not a funeral. Here is the kicker on value. A good used VQ35 out of a yard runs 400 to $700, because nobody wants them, which means even a full timing refresh on one of these costs less than the diagnostic fee on some German V6 engines. If you are shopping one, run a compression test on a DE before you hand over a cent, and on an HR, just listen for that cold start rattle and check the oil pressure. Do that, and the so-called junk engine will quietly outlast half the cars sitting in traffic next to it. So there it is, three engines, 3.5 liters each, three completely different ways of growing old. Let me give it to you straight. If you want the engine that runs the longest with the least drama down in the bottom end, the older Toyota 2GR takes this comparison, and it is not close. Nothing else here has internals built like it. Just go in knowing you are buying a great engine with an expensive oil leak somewhere in its future. There is a recall line you need to check the same day you get the keys, and do not assume the newest version is the same beast. The Honda is the heartbreaker of the group. Underneath all that VCM nonsense is a motor that should have walked away with this. Instead, it is the one that drains the most money out of people, because the thing killing it is the thing Honda installed on purpose. Unplug VCM, and it climbs right back into the fight. Leave it the way it came, and it is a repair bill on a timer. And the Nissan is the one I want you to go back and rethink. The early DE has earned your side eye, no argument. But the HR is the sleeper of this whole comparison, and you can grab one for Nissan money instead of Toyota money. That is the value play nobody talks about, because everybody is still mad at an engine from 2004. So here is my ranking. The Toyota takes it for the longest haul. The Nissan HR is the smartest money you will ever spend on this list. And the Honda lands dead last, right up until you unplug the feature that is eating it alive, and it jumps right back up the board. Tell me I am wrong. And if you are feeling good about that Nissan after what I just told you, you need to see the other half of the story. Go watch the one I made called Nissan is losing everything, and nobody is talking about it. The engine might be a sleeper, but what is happening to the company that builds it will change how you think about buying one at all. I will see you over in that one.