I'm looking to get an ES300. Today I testd rove a '97 with about 130k km or 76k miles from a private sale. Everything seemed perfectly smooth and fine except for a few things.
Rear suspension seems to be loose. I checked if there was oil leaking from the strouts, but it was fine. Going over speed bumnps or bad road there's a very faint knocking that can be felt. Anyway, I'm not too worried about that. The scary part is rust.
The body is pretty clean in general except for two places: 1. around the windshield, spots of rust are growing. 2: the "step" on the drivers side when you open the door to get onto the vehicle.
The guy has done rust proofing in the last two years, and it shows with all the grease I could see under the hood and the chassis. So I guess those are the only two places that are starting to rust.
Here in Quebec, Canada... it snows a lot, and they put salt all over the roads... so it's quite hard to keep rust away unless you wash the salt off the car every week.
The asking price is $8500CAD(~7500USD). Anyone thinks its a good buy? I'm mainly concerned about the rust around the windshield. My guess is that it would cost maybe 1000 to get it removed? Would it come back after being removed? Given the harsh conditions here.... is it worth it?
Any comments will be apreciated

Also, there are so much less used ES300 available here in canada.... either everyone sticks to their car or there aren't that many new ES300 sold lol....
Maybe I should go to the states and grab a "clean" one. 8 cars out of 10 I check here are starting to rust here and there....

 

The knocking from the suspension is common problem in 97 and 92ES's. Try to get one without the problem. As fixing the issue can be costly. I had the same issue with mine.