One Year On With My Toyota Alphard

Today is the one year anniversary of my ownership of the giant. Can't believed that time flies so fast and now the car is one year older. Mileage wise it is still pretty low as I hardly drive the car nowaday. So far I have only clocked about 10,000km for the full year in 2009!

Overall the ownership experience has been very pleasant. The giant hasn't given me any problem so far. Other than that once in a while crackling sound from the steering knuckle in the morning there is no other problem encountered so far. That is probably a testimony to the quality of Toyota car that I have heard off but never experienced it until now. It is funny that I have been a Honda fan for so long (I owned 4 Honda cars before) and none of them have given me the same ownership experience as my giant.

Other than the mis-fortune of an attempted break-in which cost me quite a bit, the maintenance of this gentle giant is very low. So far I have only done one maintenance service which cost me about RM400, I have not spend any other amount on maintenance other than the routine petrol costs. Out of the RM400, more than half of it is for the fully synthetic engine oil that I have chosen. Anyway I can't argue much about this as my ownership of my previous SUV costed me 3 times more within the same duration.

I have also installed a set of ICE into the giant for my own my passenger entertainment. However most of the time I drive the car alone and I thoroughly enjoyed the enhanced sound systems listening to my favourite CDs.

I have only driven the giant outstation twice! The first time was with the AOC members for their durian trip and the other was to Ipoh to attend a relative dinner function. This year I plan to take the giant for more outstation trips as much as I can.

I just change out the roadtax sticker this morning and then send the car to my regular accessory shop to fix the angel eyes. Yes one of the mod I did to the giant was to change the HID light bulbs in the front light cluster to projector lamps and added 4 angel eye rings (2 on each side). One of the ballast blown so the shop change it for me under warranty. This is the effect of the angel eyes when it is on.

Throuh 2009 I have really learned a lot about this car. I started this blog with the intention of just writing about my owership experience of the giant but it ended up more of technical know-how blog site for Toyota Alphard.

I have gotten a lot of queries and comments from my readers of my blog. I appreciate their times and efforts in readingmy blog. I hope my answers has help the readers in their ownership experiences. I have also received emails from reader asking for assistance to find their dream "giant". I am glad that I have managed to help a few of them in their purchase of their giants.

I know I haven't been blogging much lately as I am starting another project. I have a few technical posts that I wanted to finish up but have been postponing them for quite a while. I will try to find more time to write about the giant and will continue to respond to those who is looking for help on acquiring their own giant.

Cheers