- Impressive off-road, spacious cabin, legendary reliability
- Short on style and luxury, agricultural engine, poor ride and handling
The Toyota Land Cruiser is the ideal car for when the going gets tough, and is cheaper than its rivals, too
The Toyota Land Cruiser is a very capable and reliable 4×4, but in spite of its legendary strengths, most drivers will find it simply too agricultural compared to contemporary rivals like the Land Rover Discovery.
Sadly, the changes that were introduced in early 2018 don’t go far enough to make the car compete with the wide range of luxurious SUVs and crossover models now available. Almost without exception, those rivals offer a degree of refinement and on-road dynamism that the Land Cruiser was never intended to match.
However, if you need genuine off-road ability, it’s still a great choice, and the latest updates make it marginally better than before. Put it this way: you wouldn’t pick any of the Land Cruiser’s rivals over the Toyota for a trek through the African bush.
The Toyota Land Cruiser comes from a military background, much like the WWII US Jeep. The original Toyota BJ off-roader was created during the Korean War in 1951, and from 1954 the model became known as the Land Cruiser – Toyota already had an eye on the British Land Rover, which had launched to considerable acclaim in 1948.
Over the decades the Land Cruiser has grown in size and luxury, but it remains, first and foremost, a genuine off-road vehicle. Indeed, while other luxury and lifestyle 4x4s have adopted car-like engineering in pursuit of efficiency and refinement, the Land Cruiser has stuck to its guns by retaining a separate beefy ladder chassis of the type that’s now rarely seen outside the commercial vehicle sector.
The latest Land Cruiser is the ninth generation, and was introduced in the UK in 2008. A facelifted version with its distinctive front end arrived in early 2014 and a revised version appeared in 2015 with a slightly tweaked front grille (although it’s hard to spot the changes) and a new 2.8-litre diesel engine replaced the old 3.0-litre diesel.
There were further revisions in 2018, bringing a slightly different look to the car, as well as introducing a new dashboard that incorporates Toyota’s latest infortainment systems.
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