Advice for 1996 Camry Vienta XV10 3.0L V6 CSi

[tngster]

Hi All,

I just bought a 3rd hand 1996 Camry Vienta 3.0 CSi from a private seller. It is due to arrive on Thursday. My deal with him was that I'll pay a really good price for the car and he'll send it in for RWC inspection (and servicing if required). I test drove it and it's all pretty good. The car has only 133,000km on it. Timing belt, spark plugs, distributor, and some other things were changed at 100,000km. As far as I can tell, there were no mechanical problems with it. I did notice that one of the side lights did not fit into the body properly. I reckon that problem is easily recitified with a firm shove. The car comes with a cassette headunit and I am gonna change it to a CD headunit the moment I get the car.

Does anyone know if the ECT switch on the auto-gearbox affects the performance by much? I noticed that when I switched it to PWR, the revs are slightly higher and the gear changes are too. However it isn't like an overdrive system on some auto cars I've driven before. It doesn't feel more agile...probably cuz the car is too heavy...

Because it's a pretty big engine and a pretty big car, fuel consumption is probably not the best. Is there any way to make the car more economical while also increasing it's peak performance? ECU tuning? engine add ons?

Hope you guys can help.

Edited July 21, 2012 by tngster

[nikki1970]

for my 5 cents worth i say, the ect switch allows the gearbox to change at higher revs and thats all it does. It doesnt do any engine up power changes at all just the up shift of gears so dont expect the car to transform. For normal day to day driving you will get better economy with power button off. As to making better peak performance and increasing fuel economy pends on your pocket. But tbh more power and more economy dont go together. A simple improvement I do is changing from 91 oct to 98 octane fuel, that improves power & fuel system stays cleaner and gives more mileage.

[tngster]

Cheers man.

I don't think CSi model comes with ABS and airbags as a standard so I'm gonna be driving like a granny. Any idea how often I should send it for servicing? When the car comes back from RWC checks and/or servicing, should I consider that to be one service and then count kms from that point?

Would servicing at any garage work or should I avoid Kmart and go for places like Ultratune?

[Andrew357]

It is a Camry. Most mechanics would have serviced about 10000000 of them in their time being open. The difference between the work completed should vary little if they do a logbook service.

In terms of performance you probably won't get much over the factory tune; you might get more efficiency but the cost may not be worthwhile. You might get marginal gains using a 95/98 octane fuel.

[tngster]

I guess there isn't very much I can do to the car to improve performance unless it's at the expense of fuel. Looks like modifications will have to be aesthetic now.