Exact same situation. At this point, Iām along for the ride. I had 3 midsize trucks to choose and the Tacoma won. The Colorado had waaay too many complaints, the Ranger Raptor was fugly, so Tacoma won.
Do you know if this happens to the trailhunter as well?We went out with the new taco to try and see what it was capable of in stock configuration and I have to say, for the most part, it was great! We didnāt do anything crazy but we did test traction, comfort and clearance pretty well (although we didnāt record it all)
We tried not to beat up the truck too much but the truck did end up breakingā¦
On our way back we picked up some speed on a flat area of the desert, and without hitting any jumps, rocks, or washboard one of the top hats of out right shock managed to come apart.
These new tacos have no frame mounted bump stops like the 2nd and 3rd Gens. Instead, the shock has an āintegratedā bump stop that is simply a piece of foam that bumps the shock body to the shock mount or ātop hatā when at full compression.
Our only conclusion is that fatigue or a hard enough hit was able to crack the top hat, a cap holding the bushing for the shock shaft came out and the shaft was able to completely go through the hat. We were unable to locate the cap so we are unsure if the cap broke or simply slipped out after the hat cracked.
In any case the cap was being held in place only by a groove on the hat that might have about 3/32ā engagement with the cap, both aluminum parts. The hat seems to be formed over what seems to be a cast cap.
Needless to say, I believe the cap is not enough to take the force a bump stop normally would. I am not exaggerating when I say we DIDNāT HIT anything that would have caused a hard bottoming of the truck.
THIS IS THE 10TH TACOMA Iāve owned and weāve hit significantly worse things on old stock shocks, without a break. Pot holes on a regular street would have been much worse than anything we did on this run. Weāve worked on hundreds if not thousands of tacos at this point and weāve yet to see a shock mount break. Mostly because all other tacos did have a frame mounted bump stop I would assume, but thatās exactly the point, if youāre going to make āoff roadā shocks and integrate the bump stop, the hats better be able to take an impact. These donāt seem to be able to do that. I could be wrong and this could be a fluke but the way it is designed seems to me like a weak point that will hardly be able to take a good impact without a redesign.
We have a clip on this video of where this happened, you can see we picked up some speed but thereās no obvious exact point where this would have happened, like I said, we didnāt hit any crazy terrain while taking that shot.
Seems to only have effected the off-road model. All other trims are fine as far as I know. Makes me think it was a bad batch of top hats from bilstein
I have to drive through some rough road and about 6 speed bumps every day and my truck takes it like a champ
Yup just like the cracked hvac boxes early on, lot of talk over the summer about that.
