Toyota Land Cruiser Review 2025

The Toyota Land Cruiser is coming to the UK in only limited numbers, which is for the best. It's expensive and quite compromised on the road, so it's going to be a niche choice. Something like a Land Rover Defender delivers even better off-road performance while being more pleasant on Tarmac, and is available with myriad engine options and body styles to meet a broader range of needs. And yet, we can't help but be drawn to the loveable, chunky Land Cruiser, despite its foibles. 

What sort of images does the mention of the Toyota Land Cruiser conjure for you? Perhaps an aid convoy of white SUVs with UN stickering lumbering across a war-torn state, or maybe with spares strapped to its roof in the midst of an epic overland trek. 

You're probably less likely, we reckon, to be picturing a luxury SUV that’s quite a bit more expensive than some versions of the Audi Q7, and yet, that’s where we’re at. After a brief hiatus, the Land Cruiser is back, more luxurious than ever, and costs the best part of £80,000.

In its quest for more luxury, the Land Cruiser hasn’t done the one thing that’d make the most difference in terms of refining its on-road manners – ditching the whole body-on-frame thing. Largely abandoned by most vehicles and generally reserved mostly for pick-up trucks, this now quite old-fashioned method of car design involves, as implied by the name, a body shell grafted onto a frame, usually (and in the case of the Land Cruiser) best thought of as a big ladder.

Vehicles made in this way aren’t as rigid as ones made in a monocoque fashion, where the shell of the car is also the structure, although it makes for better off-road performance, where you actually want a bit of flex, plus more robustness. All of this sounds quite boring and technical, but it’s important, as it plays a big role in the way the Land Cruiser drives, as we’ll detail later.

Given its price and focus on off-road durability over how it drives on firmer ground, the Land Cruiser is going to be a niche choice. It's a substantial-feeling vehicle that looks brilliant but struggles to justify its pricetag when it comes to its interior plushness. Also, the idea of paying this much and ending up with a noisy four-cylinder diesel engine shared with the Hilux pick-up truck is pretty irksome. 

Clawing back some ground, the Land Cruiser can comfortably seat seven (and we mean comfortably – the third row isn't a token effort that's only of use for kids), looks great and stands a good chance of surviving an apocalypse or two.

It's also a more convincing package than the Ineos Grendadier, a car intended to pick up where the previous-generation Land Rover Defender left off, given that the new version is a bit more luxurious than before. The problem with the Ineos is it's even less pleasant on the road, and it's not far off as expensive, for something that doesn't have the reliability reputation of a Toyota nor the extensive dealer back-up. 

Remember what we were saying about body-on-frame? Here’s where it’s relevant. Because of the way it’s made, the Land Cruiser shimmys and shakes over poorly surfaced roads. The suspension has a certain firmness to it which means the body roll in the corners is reasonably well contained, but the trade-off is an unsettled nature to the ride.

The car grips well in the corners so long as you’re sensible enough and understand that the Land Cruiser isn’t going to take a bend with quite the gusto of a BMW X5. Doing so might result in a fair bit of body roll and the front end washing wide. And your passengers not being awfully happy with you.

The ride settles down to a satisfactory level on a dual carraigeway or motorway cruise, at which point you can enjoy a decent level of sound-proofing to insulate you from road and wind noise, although there is quite a lot of whistling generated by the massive wing mirrors.

Where the Land Cruiser will really shine is away from the asphalt, although our only taste of that so far has been some light green-laning. But still, the way it handled a tamer trail left us with confidence that much rougher stuff wouldn’t be too much of an issue. You just need to bear in mind that the overhang is quite substantial, making for a departure angle (how much the car can tilt before it drags its bum on the floor) that's some way off that of a Land Rover Defender.

There’s just the one engine available in the Land Cruiser. It’s a 2.8-litre, four-cylinder diesel also found in some versions of the Hilux. In a working vehicle like the Hilux, it makes sense, but here, you’re left wanting for more refinement. It’s not so bad at a cruise, but demand anything more than moderate acceleration, and good lord, does it make a racket.

It’s not anything like as smooth as the inline-six diesels offered by BMW and Mazda nor the V6 TDI units in some Audi models. Even the four-cylinder diesel engines of the latter brand are more refined. It doesn’t help that the Toyota’s 2.8-litre unit develops a relatively modest 204PS and 500Nm, which isn’t much when it’s expected to shift 2.3 tonnes of car. As such, it does need to be revved hard to get the Land Cruiser up to speed. The 0-62mph time is an underwhelming 10.9 sseconds.

The gearbox, meanwhile, isn’t exactly the more responsive, and that’s when it comes to both shifting gears and kicking down when you press the throttle.

The latest Land Cruiser hasn't yet been tested by Euro NCAP. Plenty of safety systems are included as standard, including lane assistance, traffic sign recognition, rear-cross traffic alert, autonomous emergency braking and a driver alertness monitor. We found the latter to be over-sensitive, though, and with a narrow field a few. Slouch in your seat just a little, or even recline your seat to what seems like a perfectly acceptable angle, and it'll say it can't see your face, and moan at you to sit up. It's like going back to being at the dinner table as a child. 

The land Cruiser is well-suited to towing, able to haul a braked load of up to 3,500kg, or unbraked of up to 750kg. There are three tow hitch options. It's £629 for a fixed tow bar, £645 for flanged and £735 for detachable. Some rivals go one better than all of these with an electrically attachable hitch, but something similar isn't offered here, sadly.

As is typical with most seven-seater vehicles that aren't based on a van, you get precious little boot space with the third row of seats in place. A mere 130 litres, to be exactly. Fold the rear seats, though (which happens electronically in an almost mesmerising fashion), and there's a decent 600 litres of room to use.

Drop the second row as well, and the you get a 2,000-litre load space that's easy to access thanks to the Land Cruiser's wide boot opening and boxy proportions. 

In the front, there are large door bins and an chilled cool box compartment under the front armrest. The latter works well, although it's not massive. 

Tall windows and a boxy body shell give the feeling of a spacious interior, but headroom is more restricted than you might expect, because the seats are mounted quite high. The third-row seats aren't a token effort, it should be noted – someone over six-feet tall can fit back there with a little bit of legroom to spare, but again, not much in the way of excess headroom.

There's certainly nothing wrong with the quality inside the Toyota Land Cruiser, and everything feels built to last years of use and abuse. It's just not quite as posh-feeling as other SUVs costing a similar amount, so it's hard not to feel a bit short-changed when you slide behind the wheel. 

There's nothing noticeably cheap-feeling, at least, and there are more soft-touch surfaces than you'll find in a previous-generation Land Cruiser. 

THe Land Cruiser’s touchscreen infotainment screen is a decent size at 12.3 inches, and it’s plenty responsive. It’s a little basic in terms of its colour schemes and graphic design, though. Other manufacturers pay a lot more attention in this regard, and as a consequence, the Toyota system has the feel of a mail-order aftermarket system.

It’s also brutally bright by default, and on our test car, the automatic brightness function which is supposed to change the settings based on the readings of a temperature gauge and the time of day simply didn’t work. We had to change the settings manually to avoid a distracting beam of light exploding out of the middle of the dashboard.

The in-built navigation is OK, but as with pretty much every OEM system out there, we preferred to use the wireless Android Auto connectivity to display Google Maps on the screen instead. Wireless Apple CarPlay is fitted as standard, too.

Other infotainment highlights include a 14-speaker JBL sound system, which isn’t bad yet far from class-leading in terms of sound quality, and a good smattering of USB-C ports including three in the front, along with a HDMI port. How generous. And slightly confusing.

Bearing in mind there’s a wireless charging pad as well, along with a further two USB-C ports in the middle row plus a 12-volt power port (the 'cigarette lighter' style) and another two USB-Cs for third-row passengers, you won't be struggling to keep you and your occupant's devices charged in here. 

The starting price is £78,810, as we’ve already noted, which is a great deal more than the £57,000 kicking-off point for the Land Rover Defender, although that will only get you into a basic version of the short-wheelbase 90. It’s also worth noting that there isn’t a massive options list full of expensive trinkets to push the price up further, with the main cost options being colours that range from £730 to £965. We’ll take ours in Sand, please.

There’s no plug-in hybrid version, which means the Land Cruiser won’t be winning over company car users. Its Benefit in Kind (BiK) tax rate is of the 37% variety.

The 26.4mpg combined WLTP economy figure might make you assume you're in for a wallet-busting time running a Land Cruiser, and, well, you are, frankly. We did manage to better that figure, however, averaging just over 30mpg when we tested the car, although it helped that we did a lot of motorway journeys during that time. You should be able to get more out of a diesel-engined Land Rover Defender or an Audi Q7 45 TDI. An 80-litre fuel tank should keep you away from the pumps too often if can cope with the psychological barrier of a three-figure fill-up cost at each visit. 

Because the price of the Land Cruiser is far beyond the £40,000 threshold for the government's premium car tax, the car will be liable for a £425 annual fee on top of the £195 Vehicle Excise Duty (VED) payment from years two to five of ownership. It's based on the car's original price and is transferred to each new owner, so no, you can't get around it by buying used. 

So far, it's looking like the Land Cruiser is going to be quite expensive to run, but the silver lining of all this is that the residual values seem to be quite strong, so it should be possible to recoup a decent chunk of the original purchase price when it's time to move on. 

There's only one version of the Land Cruiser available, rather than a range of trim levels. With few options available, this sole grade comes with everything you might want, including all the safety gear previously mentioned, three-zone climate control, a 14-speaker JBL sound system, heated, cooled and electrically controlled front seats, a wireless charging pad, a large infotainment touchscreen and adaptive cruise control.