I will be getting back to commuting in the near future and decided that I wanted to find a comfortable, reliable car to drive. My new drive is short enough that I am willing to compromise on MPG. My wife and I have had a 2003 Sequoia for around 3.5 years and 70k miles. It has been largely trouble free and the vehicle has continued to be simple to work on and reliable. The quality of that vehicle, as it sits now with 399k miles, sold me on Toyota, especially the UZ family of v8s. After looking at a few cars, I dropped the hammer on a 2002 Base Model with 215k. It has a lifetime of service records and all major maintenance completed in the last 15k miles. I'm very happy with the purchase so far. I wasn't necessarily looking for a base model but I'm not too bothered, it is still a very nice vehicle. I don't love the 16 inch wheels but, the upside is that tires are very cheap. I just had a set of Continental TrueContact Touring installed. That is all I've done to the car at this point.

It definitely needs to shocks/struts all the way around. I probably won't get to that for a little while. I can tell it floats a lot in turns but overall, the ride is still very comfy and the tires seem to have worn evenly. I'm also going to replace the foam surrounds on all of the speakers.

Other than that, I've got a very odd tinging-like sound that comes from inside of the center console. Sounds like it is behind the little drawer that pops out. It is very light, sounds like of like a spring making a bit of noise. At some point, I'll take out the radio and such to check it out. I'm just wondering if anyone else has experienced a similar noise..

 

Welcome to LS430 ownership. :-)

You can pull the centre console easy enough. Several guides on here and Youtube but to start you pop out the lower panel with plastic levers on either end of it.
Then it's just 2 or 3 bolts to pull the drawer section so you can see what's in there.