Why we’re running it: What lessons can be learned from running a Toyota Land Cruiser, the most old-school of current offerings?
Month 1 - Specs
Life with a Toyota Land Cruiser: Month 1
Welcoming the Land Cruiser to the fleet - 17 May 2023
You’ve never driven off-road?! Not even once?!” an incredulous Piers Ward exclaimed over the airwaves from his home in rural Lincolnshire. “No, because there are roads where I want to go,” came my cheeky reply from a Sussex suburb.
Our associate editor was calling to deliver the news that my wee Yaris Cross was going to be swapped for a gigantic Land Cruiser – two Toyotas seemingly from different universes.
Land Cruisers being as rare as Ward’s favoured flat caps around here and the possibility of meeting a mamba appealing to me about as much as catching Covid, I had never fully appreciated this 4x4’s popularity or depth of lore.
Since 1951, Toyota has sold more than 10 million Cruisers – enough for every person in London today with plenty to spare. Many of those have ended up in Africa and Australia, but they’re also popular in South America and the Middle East – basically, anywhere you need the off-road ability of a Land Rover without the associated reliability concerns. The one complication is there isn’t just one Land Cruiser.
Most places, but very few of them in Europe, have the J300, released in 2021. Over here, we get what they know as the Land Cruiser Prado, which is smaller and which has been in its J150 generation since 2009, its second facelift coming in 2017. And in really hardcore places, like Chile, Namibia and Canada, there are also Land Cruisers 76, 78 and 79, variants of the J70 that has been in production since 1984. The same year the Mercedes-Benz W124 and Ferrari Testarossa were born…
So why are we running a Land Cruiser now, in 2023? I won’t even pretend it’s to see if it can function as a city car or a good commuter, for obvious reasons. Instead, we’re doing so because it’s perhaps the most anachronistic car sold by a mainstream manufacturer today and seems to be made more so by the day as everything else becomes electrified, connected and autonomous, which makes it a real curio, an item of rare interest. I guess this is what you get when you write articles about the 1920s (see p66) and wear a baseball cap that reads ‘modernity has failed us’…
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Are you sure this is allowed in Autocar these days? I didnt think you were interested in things with internal combustion any longer
Right... do you ever read Autocar, or does that interfere with your 'not even allowed a sausage these days' nonsense?
Matt Prior ran one on a long term test just a few years ago. Could you really not get anything else?