#Toyota

It's Toyota madness this week, thanks to the 2024 Toyota Land Cruiser unveiling last night.

Today's UCOTD is a tough mudder. A 13-inch "bob" and a 5:29 Detroit rear locker, along with a 5:29 front axle are just the tip of the off-road iceberg for this 1981 Toyota Pickup Crawler.

Toyota's Land Cruiser is back after three years. And it will have a base price in the mid-$50,000s.

The covers come off the next Toyota Land Cruiser later today.

A group of gearheads from Down Under have apparently set a new world record for driving a car underwater, taking a specially prepped old-school Land Cruiser about 7 kilometers (approximately 4.5 miles) across the floor of Darwin Harbour.

After emerging from the briny deep, one onlooker told the team to “drive this thing straight to the pub.” It doesn’t get more Oz than that.

Today's UCOTD is, uh, interesting. This 2002 Toyota Tacoma Prerunner TRD has more than 283K miles on the clock, it's 21 years old, and the price is $15,000.

The slow drip of information about the upcoming square-as-a-box Toyota Land Cruiser continues with the teaser photo you see above. 

Toyota is a sleeping giant. They’ve been building solid-but-boring cars, trucks, and crossovers for several decades, succeeding due to a legacy of anvil-like reliability. Of late, they’ve outsourced their sporty cars to other automakers or stuck the TRD badge on things like the Camry to which no sane mind would think to look for sportiness.

Disclaimer - I kinda dig the TRD Camry. 

But in the background, somewhere beyond the company that builds pickup trucks, SUVs, and even forklifts, you simply had to know there lingered a cadre of enthusiasts. A merry band of gearheads who would not rest until they had something they could build and enjoy by themselves. While it started with the rally-inspired GR Yaris overseas, we husky Yanks couldn’t be trusted to squeeze ourselves into such a wee hatch. Instead, we see this 2023 Toyota GR Corolla Morizo Edition. From what I can deduce using online translators and my butt dyno, Morizo roughly translates as batshit insane.

We’ve been hearing about the rise of electric vehicles for years, but while they are growing rapidly in number, there’s still a disconnect between an auto industry hell-bent on electrification and the desires of the people they rely on to buy new cars. Axios recently highlighted the issue and found that dealers have EV inventory sitting on their lots for extended periods, suggesting that supply is significantly outpacing demand.

It’s an open secret that the Big T is on the cusp of returning this storied nameplate to North American showrooms, meaning the release of a shadowy teaser image isn’t a huge surprise. Still, it’s neat to see what’s in the hopper for this off-road brute.

Today's UCOTD is a project vehicle, no doubt. That said, someone who snags this non-running 1988 Toyota 4Runner V6 could end up with a delightful off-road rig if he or she has the time and money to get it all fixed up.

It's another 1985 Toyota Celica Supra -- I guess I am drawn to these cars. Maybe because I grew up in the '80s and '90s myself.

Large, family-hauling SUVs prioritize comfort for obvious reasons. With the 2023 Toyota Sequoia, the brand also tried to be stylish. One mission accomplished, one not so much.

Chrysler revolutionized the American family-hauler world in the 1984 model year when the Plymouth Voyager and Dodge Caravan minivans first appeared. That same year, Toyota began selling Americanized versions of its LiteAce/ TownAce/ MasterAce Surf vans over here, attracting less attention but moving enough of them that I still see them during my junkyard travels. Here's an '87 that received the camper-conversion treatment, now residing in a Northern California car graveyard.

Sometimes, the new model year of a stalwart model brings the slightest of changes. For 2024, the top-selling sedan in today’s Lexus lineup gets a few blink-and-you’ll-miss-‘em tweaks.