Starter motor OEM Toyota or OEM Subaru

It turns out it was the starter motor. Managed to get a second hand one and changed it over, took the told one apart and noticed it had 4x brushes in it and one was completely worn down or potentially could have cracked at some point. Still confuses me to why it would start sometimes and not others. However, this must have been a problem for a while as my car sounds completely different when starting up, really clean!!!!

I suggest you go with a brand new OEM replacement.. an aftermarket one will genuinely fail much earlier.. the original lasted you this long.. but once cry once

It seems to work pretty well, AC/heat keep blowing with the engine off in well designed systems. Starter is often much better than conventional starters, bringing engine to higher RPM at start which reduces the normal issues with constant start-stop.

Subaru knew their customers were gonna pitch a fit about this so they way overbuilt the starter. It’s rated for 260,000 starts which breaks down to a little over 70/day every single day for 10 years. It’s also physically much larger than the standard starter from previous generations.

Toyota 2UZ is in the same spot, and the original starter in those can last well past 250k miles when they're not being roasted by the exhaust and drenched in water regularly.

Starter at ~180k miles and steering rack at ~300k, never left me stranded.

I have an 01 sequoia, so same engine and had to do mine at around 250k. It was starting on its way out, slower cranking, occasionally it just wouldn't crank, just typical issues of one needing replaced.

I have had intermittent issues with a cold start where it would need to crank for much longer than seemed appropriate.

We had the starter die long before the recalls and paid out of pocket and then had to fight with Subaru for some of our money after the recall came out. 3 years later, here we are again with a dead car and I think it is the starter as it is acting the same way it did last time. We replaced it with an OEM starter so I am now wondering if that was part of the batch that was recalled? I'm honestly so sick of this car not starting when we need it to

People are really trying to hype this feature up, but i\u2019ve replaced at least 10 starters this year on vehicles with auto stop/start.