How well does the new 2024 Toyota Land Cruiser cruise on pavement?
Pros
- Comfortable ride
- Killer looks
- Roomy interior
Cons
- No third-row seat, we guess
- Doesn’t feel like a $75,000 interior
- Only a four-cylinder?
Fun fact: Our instrumented testing takes place on, you guessed it, clean pavement. We don’t measure new vehicles’ 0–60-mph performance, lateral acceleration, or braking distances on dirt or rocks. That doesn’t mean our first test reviews can’t also touch on a vehicle’s off-road acumen — but this report on the new Toyota Land Cruiser will not.
Don’t fire off that hate email just yet!
We did take the 2024 Land Cruiser off-roading, but as part of a different story. You’ll be able to read that one soon. For this rundown of the Land Cruiser’s abilities, though, we’re keeping things commuter and focusing solely on its on-road behavior. Want to know how the resurrected Land Cruiser tackles the urban grind, where — admit it — most of these boxy 4x4s will spend a good portion of their useful lives? Read on.
Cushy and comfy
There’s no polite-seeming way to say this, but the Land Cruiser drives like a brand-new 30-year-old SUV. Despite its new-tech hybridized turbocharged four-cylinder engine, its 12.3-inch touchscreen and its 12.3-inch digital gauge cluster, the Toyota is still a tall, squared-off thing perched atop a separate frame with a live rear axle. There are 8.0 inches of ground clearance beneath that hardware, which also includes locking center and rear differentials.
The ride is soft and wallowy, and the body bounces around over speed bumps and wavy pavement. But it’s quiet while going about its work, the body motions are well controlled, and there isn’t any wheel flutter like you’d typically get with too-loose damping. Everything is cohesively soft, so wheel motions are managed in kind. With the Land Cruiser’s beefy 265/70R18 Michelin LTX Trail tires having tall sidewalls and an unaggressive tread pattern — these look like gigantic minivan tires, not the sort of all-terrains the Land Cruiser’s Lexus GX offers on its hardcore off-road variants — the Toyota simply rolls over broken pavement without drama.
All of these squishy behaviors translate to the test track about how you’d expect. The Land Cruiser stops in an OKish 117 feet, all while parking its bumper on the pavement ahead. And that’s when the stop is on a relatively straight path — stab the brakes with any steering input at all, and the body rope-a-dopes, a behavior exacerbated by the short-travel brake pedal whose handoff between the electric motor slowing things down via regen to the mechanical brakes can be abrupt when hitting the brakes quickly. (Smoother around-town inputs return more natural, linear responses and better blending of regen and mechanical braking.) Around our skidpad, the SUV generates a weak 0.68 g of lateral grip, and its tendency to scrub its front tires during hard cornering limits its figure-eight lap times, too.
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Refreshingly simple
Is the Land Cruiser bad to drive? Not at all — it simply isn’t set up to set pavement ablaze. And its objective limits are higher than, say, the Mercedes-Benz G550’s, a pricier off-road SUV with the same basic independent-front, live-axle-rear, body-on-frame setup but only capable of a meager 0.61 g of lateral grip and a 136-foot braking distance.
It's refreshing, too, that the entire setup is fixed. There are no height-adjustable air springs or electronically adaptive dampers like those included in the Lexus GX. Nor is there much else to mess with. Toyota fits a double-use drive mode selector to the center console; depending on which of the three buttons below that knob is pressed, it can cycle between Eco, Normal and Sport drive modes (for road driving) or Auto, Dirt, Sand, Mud and Deep Snow settings (in the MTS terrain management menu). A DAC Crawl button enters a dedicated low-speed crawl cruise control mode where you can adjust the Land Cruiser’s speed while descending or ascending steep hills.
What the inside’s like
Other controls are scattered this way and that, in classic Toyota fashion. There is a parking camera loitering below the climate controls alongside an old-school switch delete plate for an unknown feature U.S.-market Land Cruisers appear to lack (this First Edition truck is fully loaded for our market); a Tow/Haul button lives next to a different delete plate closer to the steering wheel, under the ignition button. Foglight, interior light dimmer, parking sensor, automatic high-beam, power tailgate release, fuel door release and AC power outlet activation switches are stuffed to the left of the steering wheel, above trailer brake sliders.
The only concessions to modernity inside are the digital real estate taken up by the gauge cluster and central touchscreen, USB-C ports and a wireless charging pad to the right of the shift lever. Oh, and the most irritating feature of all, an attention-tracking device — the mirrored black strip atop the steering column — that activates annoying, chiding messages in the gauge cluster (plus a loud “ding!”) to “sit up” and “look forward” anytime the facial tracker is obstructed by, say, your arm if you hold the steering wheel at the 12 o’clock position. Or if you turn your head to check your blind spot. Or if your gaze lingers anywhere but straight ahead for longer than a half-blink. It’s bad enough that you might want to skip the First Edition solely to avoid it.
Otherwise, the cabin is simply styled and vaguely retro, with a plain steering wheel hub wearing “TOYOTA” lettering and rectilinear buttons. As with the exterior design, the interior seems to lean on the 60-series Land Cruisers of the 1980s for inspiration. Anyone who grew up with Toyotas of any kind in their families decades ago will find the padded vinyl trim on the door panels and dashboard charmingly familiar; it is not, in any real way, an interior befitting our Land Cruiser First Edition’s $76,475 price tag, though. The Land Cruiser’s luxurious side is reserved for the full-size 300-series models the rest of the world gets, while America makes do with this smaller, more affordable 200-series variant.
It'll get you there, slowly
Even the way the hybridized engine goes about its business feels old-school. As in new-generation Toyota Tacomas with this same i-Force MAX powertrain, the turbocharged four-cylinder engine that the electric motor assists is torquey and slightly gruff. This isn’t a Prius, and you’ll feel the engine vibrating slightly; it’s just noticeable enough to feel “trucky” without tipping over into “unrefined.” The i-Force MAX setup is quieter here, though, than it is in the Tacoma.
With only eight forward speeds to the similar Lexus GX’s 10, the Toyota tends to hang on to taller gears, relying on the hybrid’s torque rather than outright engine speed to keep momentum up. Fewer shifts also lend the proceedings a classic vibe, without the hurried shuffling through gears you get in the GX and other 10-speed-equipped modern vehicles.
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That said, more gears might help the Land Cruiser make more of its 326 horsepower and overcome its prodigious mass. At 5,642 pounds, this First Edition is even heavier than both Lexus GX550 models we’ve tested despite lacking their more luxurious trimmings, air suspension, twin-turbo V-6 engine and other widgets. We suspect the hybrid bits — the 48-hp electric motor, the battery to power it — along with the First Edition’s big roof rack are behind the beer gut because the Toyota should otherwise weigh less.
It should therefore be unsurprising that, with 23 fewer horsepower, 14 fewer lb-ft of torque and an additional 100 pounds or so to carry, the Land Cruiser is slower than the GX to 60 mph. We didn’t think it’d be this much slower, however; at 8.0 seconds to 60, it’s 1.5 to 1.7 seconds behind the Lexus GX550 Premium and GX550+ Overtrail models.
Fuel economy also suffers from the weight; the EPA rates the Land Cruiser at 23 mpg combined, but in practice, we saw about 16 mpg — in the ballpark of the non-hybrid, six-cylinder GX’s EPA combined figure and what we saw in the real world during an earlier stint in similar conditions. It’s clear the hybrid system is here not for fuel economy but rather to make the four-cylinder turbo engine acceptable in a vehicle that, when wearing a Lexus badge, gets a much beefier V-6.
Therefore, the Land Cruiser is less a performer than an excellent performative way of living out your fantasies of driving a relatively basic, functional Toyota 4x4. While our deeper report on the Land Cruiser’s off-road capability is forthcoming (we also hit the dirt in our first drive review), we can say this: The SUV reminds you of its off-pavement roots at all times, but in a throwback way that’s largely comfortable and charming. Pack up the huge cargo area (which includes cupholders, armrests and USB ports on the side walls for the third-row seat Toyota doesn’t offer here in America), and head to your favorite trails or campsite with the peace of mind that your anachronistic-feeling SUV has a new car warranty.
Photos by Jim Fets.