Toyota LandCruiser is an off-road beast – so let’s ditch the luxury

Trying to add luxury to Toyota’s most rough-and-tumble off-road vehicle – and charge us silly money for the privilege – feels wrong. The company has an identity crisis on its hands.

Toyota Land Cruiser Commercial.

I know this is a motoring column, but to make a point I’m going to start by writing about mashed potato. My recipe for this works quite well and is probably similar to yours. I boil the potatoes in salted water until they are soft. I then mash them by hand until all the lumps have gone, while adding milk and butter, and then I put them on a plate under some gravy. It works. I know this because no one has ever said, “This mashed potato you’ve made is terrible.”

Restaurants, however, cannot serve mashed potato that has been made this way. They have to make it complicated to justify the price, and so we swoon and genuflect in the turbulence of the chef’s magnificence. But how do you make mashed potato complicated?

Well, they don’t just use any old spud. They insist on preposterous breeds such as Yukon gold or ratte, and they don’t use a masher like you and I have in the utensils drawer. Instead they push their potato through a cone-shaped piece of muslin or something called a tamis. Which is the preferred method because literally no one in the world knows what a tamis is. It’s the catering industry’s answer to myrrh.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, because first you must peel the potatoes and then boil the peelings in a pan of water for 40 minutes. Then you use this water, which now has mud in it, to boil the potatoes at 70C for half an hour. And finally, after you’ve done your thing with the cooking implement no one’s heard of, 250g of butter is added along with a cup of hot whole milk. Et voilà. Something that can sit on a menu with a price tag of £140.

I bring all of this up because we see the same sort of thing in the car world. You take a basic recipe and then, to justify a whopping price, you layer it up with all sorts of stuff that, really and truly, no one needs.

Which brings me to the new Toyota LandCruiser. I reviewed it back in January and I wasn’t terribly impressed because they’d built a genuinely sturdy car using the old-fashioned recipe of a live rear axle and a separate chassis. And then they’d festooned it with Yukon gold leather and an interior that had been strained through a tamis. So they had ended up with a diamond-encrusted clog, and that meant it arrived in my drive costing £75,000. Silly money, really.

The new Toyota LandCruiser.

Last week, however, Toyota sent round a different version that cost nigh on £25,000 less. Called the Commercial, it had no back seats at all. Behind the driver there was a steel mesh, and behind that just a vast empty space. It wasn’t even carpeted. You could put a dead sheep in there and not worry. And I know this because I did.

They’ve also lined the back windows with steel, so it is really a van, and I liked that right up to the point I arrived at an oblique junction and couldn’t see if anything was coming. How do people in actual vans cope with this? Why aren’t they all dead?

As for how well it works off-road, well, I can’t really think of any geological feature that I’ve ever encountered that would stop it. Every off-road gizmo I’ve ever heard of is fitted. Locking diffs. Low-range options of the gearbox. Hill descent control. Everything. And the tyres are properly knobbly too. Couple all this to Toyota’s legendary quality and, frankly, if I had to choose a car in which I was marooned in a jungle or a desert, this would be it.

On the road things are less rosy. The 2.8-litre diesel engine is almost comedically rough and it’s gutless too. There’s only 150kW on tap, which means the top speed is a geological 164km/h. Range Rovers were going faster than that 30 years ago.

Inside the Toyota Land Cruiser Commercial.

The ride, as you’d expect in a car where the body is bolted to the chassis and fitted with the same suspension as you’d find on a medieval ox cart, is fidgety and at times uncomfortably crashy. It’s probably good for your core, dealing with this constant movement, but it’s not very relaxing.

The leather-lined, luxo five-seater I tested earlier in the year had the same problems. It’s why I didn’t like it very much. But this rough and readiness doesn’t feel at all out of place in what’s basically an off-road van. It feels right that you have to manhandle it round the corners and rev the nuts off it to get it up a hill. It shimmies and shakes because this car is for working, not taking you to the theatre. This car is my mashed potato, not Heston Blumenthal’s.

That said, I believe Toyota could go further. I believe it could shed even more because why does a blue-collar car like this need electric seats? And why does it need to be fitted with quite the bossiest health-and-safety dashboard officer yet seen in the world of motoring?

I’ve written before about how the Toyota driver-monitoring system occasionally flashes ludicrous messages on to the dash such as “sit up straight”. There’s another that says it has detected that the driver’s eyes are closed. But if that’s true, what good’s a written message – wouldn’t a klaxon be better? (Actually, there is a klaxon that sounds when you turn the volume up or down. Why? I know I’ve turned the radio up because it’s now louder.) But the best message was “driver’s face not detected”. What am I supposed to do? Look in the footwell in case it’s fallen off?

None of this nannying is needed in any car but especially not in a rough-and-tumble off-road worker van. So why doesn’t Toyota lose it, and the leather and the electric tailgate and all the other “luxuries”? If it could get the price below £40,000, this car really would be quite something.

Let me put it this way. Many years ago I made a cauliflower cheese. I boiled some cauliflower, poured a cheese sauce over the top and popped it under the grill. But then, before I could plate it, my friend Adrian Gill chucked a handful of nutmeg all over it. Now, even if you like nutmeg, and I really don’t, this is unnecessary. Because if you fancy cauliflower cheese, what you want is some cauliflower and some cheese. If you add anything else, all you’re doing is masking the flavour of what you wanted in the first place, and adding expense. So there you are, Toyota. That’s my advice. Lose the nutmeg.

Jeremy’s rating: 3/5