If you bought a Toyota because you wanted the automotive equivalent of a brick that starts every morning, the last two years have probably been a tough watch. The latest chapter in the Tundra’s twin-turbo V6 saga is here, and it’s the kind of news that turns an enthusiast forum into a torch-and-pitchfork convention: Toyota may not actually replace every one of the 270,000 recalled engines after all.
Instead, the automaker is rolling out free inspections and diagnostics for the Toyota and Lexus models packing the troubled V35A-FTS, and only some of them will get a brand-new motor bolted in. The rest? They get a clean bill of health, a pat on the hood, and a polite suggestion to stop worrying.
What Actually Went Wrong
The culprit here is machining debris left inside the engine at the factory, which can chew up the #1 main bearing and, given enough time and load, encourage the 3.4-liter twin-turbo to disassemble itself from the inside out. A teardown of one seized Tundra engine showed exactly how grim that process looks. So far, Toyota has swapped out more than 70,000 engines, which is not a small number when you say it out loud.
This is also recall number three, or four depending on how you’re counting, since the whole thing kicked off in May 2024. There was another in November 2025, and the latest landed in May 2026. For a brand whose entire identity is reliability, that’s a rough cadence.
The NHTSA Update
An updated recall went out on June 15, 2026, via NHTSA. The gist: owners get called back to the dealer, where inspection software evaluates the #1 main bearing and pulls available drive data to judge its condition. If the software can’t confirm the bearing is in the clear, the engine gets replaced. If it can, you keep what you’ve got. Everything is free of charge, which is the bare minimum but worth noting.
Symptoms owners have reported include knocking, rough idle, and the worst-case scenario of total engine failure. Toyota says vehicles from the original May 2024 recall will still get replacements if they haven’t already, and anyone who’s already had a swap doesn’t need to come back. A design change to the V35A-FTS reportedly went in back in July 2024.
Why Owners Are Mad
Here’s the emotional core of it: you go buy from arguably the most trusted name in the business, and you end up with an engine that might shred its own bearings. Tundra owners reportedly want Toyota to simply “do what is right” and admit there’s an inherent design flaw, rather than running a software check and calling it a day, even when a failure is only theoretical.
To date, Toyota hasn’t publicly copped to a design flaw, and it’s still building the V35A-FTS at its factories, which have been cranking these out since the 2022 Tundra. Some owners with zero problems are frankly tired of the noise. Others see the inspection-only approach as Toyota quietly tapping the brakes on a financial bloodbath. Either way, the trust dent is real, and you don’t fix that with diagnostic software.
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