What do you do if you have to drive 125,000 miles per year and have to have a pickup?
If you're Victor Sheppard of Houma, La., and the year is 2007, you buy one of the first Toyota Tundras built at the new San Antonio production facility. And then you drive it for nine years, taking meticulous care of it.
Believe it or not, Sheppard's pickup recently passed 1,000,000 miles on the odometer, and it still has the original engine, transmission and paint job. Although it now sports a few dents, Sheppard has kept track of every one of its 117 regularly scheduled dealership service visits during the last nine years, with the most serious repairs being a replaced alternator, water pump, and a few timing belts.
Once Toyota corporate heard about this special pickup — after Sheppard's Houma dealership did a Facebook post about the trip odometer hitting 999,999 miles — it didn't take chief truck engineer Mike Sweers and his team long to contact Sheppard to see if Toyota could make a trade.
"Having a million-mile truck in as pristine condition as this one with original parts is a truly rare find," Sweers said in a statement. "Our team plans to tear down the entire truck, bumper-to-bumper, top-to-bottom to evaluate how the quality and safety we designed, engineered and built into the Tundra has held up to over one-million miles of real-world driving and help us continue providing ever-better vehicles for our customers."
Sweers and his team will disassemble the truck during the next several months to inspect the engine, chassis, body, interior and other components to gain a better understanding where they should be looking when updating the current full-size Tundra.
As for Sheppard, who is something of a Tundra loyalist, he was happy to swap his 2007 model for a brand–new 2016 version, which will become the 16th Tundra he's owned.
We don't know how many more million–mile Tundra pickups we'll see (this is the first we've ever heard of), but we're glad the Toyota engineers can study this one with the intent of making this type of milestone happen again.
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