In the last Rottweiler Motors Truck update, I ended with a rather optimistic sentence.
Hopefully, the next update would begin with two simple words.
It passed.
Well.
It didn’t.
MFK Day
After almost a year of evenings, weekends, repairs and far too much time underneath this Toyota, today was finally MFK day.
I drove to Schafisheim hoping that maybe — just maybe — we had done enough.
The inspector started going through the Land Cruiser carefully. At first, I was still reasonably optimistic. Then he moved underneath the truck and started hitting different parts of the underbody with his hammer.
Once.
Twice.
Again.
And then I heard it.
That dry, ugly crunch of corrosion coming loose somewhere underneath the car.
Fuck.
At that point, I had a pretty good idea where this was going.
The List
Unfortunately, I was right.
The inspection was stopped because there were simply too many defects to continue pretending this was going to be a pass.
Some of them were serious.
There was an oil leak around the valve cover. Corrosion on the inner rear-left sill. The suspension test on the front axle failed. And the parking brake showed a massive difference between left and right.
Then there were the other things.
Some of it was… well, very Swiss.
Old motorway vignettes on the windscreen had to be removed. The front wiper blades apparently weren’t good enough either.
Fair enough. Rules are rules, and neither of those is exactly difficult to fix. But when the same inspection report already contains rust, suspension and brake problems, being told that your old vignette also has to go feels almost comical.
At that point it became pretty clear: the inspector wasn’t going to let anything slide.
“The List Isn’t Complete”
Eventually, he handed me the inspection report.
His summary was painfully simple:
“Those 20 minutes went by quickly. I found quite a lot.”
Then came the best sentence on the entire sheet:
Further defects are possible. The listed defects are not exhaustive.
In other words: this isn’t even necessarily the full list.
His final comment?
“There’s still a lot to do.”
Fuck.
Back to the Workshop
So there was no victorious drive home. No celebratory photo with a freshly passed inspection. And definitely no feeling that this project was finally finished.
Instead, I left Schafisheim with a two-page inspection report and a new to-do list.
After everything we have already repaired on this thing, that hurts.
But this is also exactly what buying the cheapest Land Cruiser in Switzerland was always going to be about.
You don’t buy a nearly thirty-year-old Toyota with almost 300,000 kilometres at the bottom of the market and expect the story to be easy.
So, back to the workshop.
Fix the oil leak. Deal with the rust. Sort the suspension. Fix the parking brake. Remove the offending vignette. Fit new wipers.
Then go back and try again.
The Land Cruiser failed its MFK.
Hopefully, one day, I’ll finally get to write those two words.
It passed.