One of the guy work next to me got this 2000 ES with 277k miles on the car and he was doing the valve cover gasket.
He called me to take a look at the top part of the engine after he removed the valve cover. It's amazingly clean and almost look like new. After some investigation I found out that the original complaint was " The car die after start up and happened a few times a week", so it's really common problem for the ES with bad Idle Air Control Valve. The tech found some oil leaks around valve covers, so he informed the customer. He got an o.k to replace the valve cover gaskets. The service history shows that the customer always bring the car in for every services if he's in town due to his business, so he's travel a lot and have two houses in two states.
Anyway, this is how it look under the valve cover with original engine and regular oil change.


Sorry about the image from my cell phone..

 

The Odo on the car.... This is one of the cleanest and well taken care from day one.

 

That's amazing! My ES is at 200k+ but it's nowhere that clean.

 

Wow I haven't had to fix anything major on mine but i can't imagine any car with that many miles to be that clean

 

That is awesome
WOW! I don't think I'll make it that high, but I hope mines looks like that underneath as well

 

Your car is beautiful. Do you use synthetic oil? I was told that if I happen to go over the oil change mileage it would be okay. Does anyone have an opinion?

 

Welcome to CL. It's not my car. It's one of the customer car. He just follows the regular maintenance with 5,000 miles interval between oil change.

 

Cool

I wish my speedo needle looked like that

 

That's how they look when you change the oil every 5,000-7,500 miles.

 

Goes to show, maintaining a car is not a joke.

 

Yea it irritates me when people refuse to do routine maintenance to their cars then they complain about it when something breaks. The other day a crazy lady had a 98 or 99 ES 300 in the shop for a "check ticking noise from engine"(unpaid by the way) and low and behold, no oil on the dipstick and the sticker on the window said 130K. The odo read 142something. So I go the ok to do the lof and asked my MVS to tell the customer about regular maintenance. I also recommended valve covers, p/s pump, and timing belt but she had no money. Next time I see the car it will be on a flatbed. Drive cars you can afford to take care of i.e. Chevy Aveo