Jeremy Clarkson review: Toyota LandCruiser Invincible
If you’re looking for a proper off-road vehicle, the options are limited. So no wonder there’s a buzz around the new Toyota LandCruiser.
I’ve been getting it wrong for 40 years. Like most motoring journalists I have always judged an off-road car on its ability to keep going when conditions dictate you should turn around and go home. So when I was reviewing an off-roader, I examined its torque curve and the fanciness of its locking differentials and its ground clearance. But in truth what actually matters is: when you put a dead sheep in the back, how easy is it to wash out the resultant juices later on?
Land Rover will take you to its proving ground at Eastnor Castle in Herefordshire and amaze you with how well a Defender climbs every mountain and fords every stream. And you go home and write a report saying that Jesus is back and he has headlights. But look at the little folding hooks they fit in the boot of the current Defender and wonder how long they would last if you attached a chainsaw to them, or some fence posts. And then look at the carpet and imagine the smell after it’s been soaked through with sheep juice.
Simplicity is what’s needed in the countryside. Not design. The Ineos Grenadier was supposed to address this problem, and on paper it does. But I fear it was put on sale before the engineering development was complete, and it is quite expensive.
Money’s another issue. There was a time when farmers and foresters went about their business in either an old Land Rover or some kind of corrugated-iron Subaru that they’d picked up from the local agricultural supply shop. Not because they were especially brilliant off road, but because there was no fancy trim to break and no carpets to house smells. And because they were cheap.
Later they all switched to pick-up trucks in general and the Mitsubishi L200 in particular. But Mitsubishi doesn’t import that any more and now Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves – I think of her as Rachel from accounts – has decided that double cab pick-ups are in fact company cars and should be taxed as such. So they are no longer cheap.
And that doesn’t really bring me on to the new Toyota Land Cruiser, which is not even on nodding terms with inexpensiveness. And you can’t have one anyway as the waiting list stretches into the middle of the 24th century. Still, I’ve been getting a lot of calls recently from my more patient friends in the soily bits of Britain asking what it’s like. So here goes.
There’s no doubt it’s a looker. Even though my test car was painted in a colour only ever before seen coming out of the back of a poorly dog, there’s no getting round the fact that this car has a sort of infantile Tonka toyishness to it. I liked it. But there are a few issues. The engine’s terrible. In the fullness of time there will be more options, even a hybrid, but for now all you can have is a 2.8-litre turbo-diesel, which feels and sounds as if it was invented in about 1956. God, it’s rough. And gutless.
And there’s more bad news, I’m afraid. Almost every other manufacturer now fits its off-road cars with an all-in-one monocoque chassis. In layman’s terms, the body is the backbone. It is where the strength comes from. But the Land Cruiser still has a separate chassis and a live rear axle. As you drive along you can feel this. It’s fidgety and you’re always having to make steering corrections, like they did in old-fashioned movies.
The thing is, though, as you lurch along at 10km/h with tissues in your ears to drown out the din, the car is speaking to you of its toughness and its durability and its longevity. And you know it’ll handle the knocks that a life in the sticks will mete out. And keep handling them till the end of days.
By which time you’ll probably have fathomed out the electronics. We all know that in business people use in-house acronyms that make no sense in the real world. And then they have a PR department that translates those acronyms into a language journalists can turn into English. But in the Land Cruiser the language has gone straight from the boardroom on to the dash. RCTA. RVAI. RCD. SEA. These are some of the things that can be turned off and on and I have no idea what any of them are.
I failed to find the submenu that turns off the endless array of warnings. At one point a message on the dash told me to open my eyes. And what’s the point of that? Because if they really had been shut I wouldn’t have seen it.
I did, after looking at YouTube videos, fathom out how to engage and disengage all the various differentials and the stability aids, and can confirm that if you were truly lost in the middle of Chad this is the sort of car that would keep you rolling. It has all the features that motoring journalists love. In the UK, though? I’m not so sure any of it’s necessary. You never really see a farmer up to his door handles in mud.
The Land Cruiser, then, was obviously designed for people in oil exploration and the UN and miners in the Australian outback. That’s why so few are imported into the UK. It’s not really for us; all of the things that make it so good in deserts and the tundra make it a bit wearing on a British motorway. And far too big in a British city. In London it looks and feels ridiculous.
In the countryside it doesn’t look or feel ridiculous and there is a reassuring toughness to the trim. But I still wouldn’t put a dead sheep in the boot because this is a £75,000 car.
It’s the same story with the Range Rovers we have. Mine is old and valueless and I use it on the farm every day. Lisa’s is new (shopkeeping pays better than farming) and I don’t like to even put the dogs in the boot. It feels wrong and a bit show-offy to put a muddy animal in the back of a £150,000 car.
So it’s all a bit gloomy really. The Land Cruiser is a bit much. The Range Rover is a bit posh. Subaru doesn’t make corrugated iron pick-ups any more, the Grenadier isn’t finished and Ms Reeves has priced pick-ups out of the market. There may be many off-roaders to keep motoring journalists happy, but the job of actually getting about in the countryside has never been so hard.
Still. Not the end of the world because one day soon there won’t be any countryside any more. Just a lot of wind farms and solar parks. And you could keep those operational from the saddle of a bicycle.
Toyota LandCruiser Invincible
ENGINE: 2.75-litre, four-cylinder turbodiesel
PERFORMANCE: 0-100km/h 10.9 seconds, top speed 170km/h
PRICE: LandCruiser range from $75,600
JEREMY’S RATING: 3 out of 5
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