I Bought a 2024 Toyota Sequoia TRD Pro!

This is the 2024 Toyota Sequoia TRD Pro. And in fact, it's my Sequoia TRD Pro. Out of the five full-size SUVs that are currently on the market today, it's generally agreed that the Toyota Sequoia is the fourth best. And now I have one. Take that, Nissan Armada. Today, I'm going to explain what led me to buy this vehicle. And since I haven't reviewed one of these yet, I'm also going to show you around it and show you some of its quirks and features. Today's video is brought to you by Cars and Bids, my online enthusiast car auction site that recently sold this and this and this and this and this. All right, I'm gonna start this video before I get into the quirks and features with an explanation of why I, a seemingly rational human being, would buy a vehicle the size of a research laboratory with camouflage seats. So allow me to explain. This all began several months ago when I decided to simplify my life. I have already mentioned this in several videos and our podcasts and our live shows, but I wanted to make life simpler. At my peak of buying stuff, I had nine cars, two of which were 3,000 miles away from my main home base, and the average age of my vehicle fleet was 20 years old. So a lot of cars and a lot of needs and it was a lot to deal with and I wanted to make my life easier. So over the last three months, I have been selling a lot of my cars, as you have probably noticed if you watch my channel. I sold my Mercedes-Benz A-Class to Kevin from New York. I love you, Kevin. I sold my old yellow Land Rover Defender. I sold my Toyota Land Cruiser and I didn't mention this on the channel, but I sold my wife's Volvo XC60 Crossover. Four vehicles sold in 90 days just getting stuff out of the door and getting my life simplified and it felt so good not to be dealing with all of those cars. Now as much as I would have loved to just sell all of those cars and replace them with nothing and truly simplify my existence, unfortunately that wasn't possible. Selling those four cars meant that I did have one gap in my family vehicle situation and I needed to fill that gap. And my particular needs for this vehicle that I had to get were tremendously narrow. They were unbelievably particular and specific and difficult to actually get in one car, which is how I ended up with this behemoth camouflage seat situation. So here is what I needed. Allow me to explain. Around town in regular normal driving use, I have a Mercedes-Benz E450 all-terrain station wagon, which I adore and love and still use every time I need to go somewhere with my wife, my family, my kids. That is my normal around town regular daily driver vehicle. My wife and I share it. We love it. It is a fantastic car. However, when our families come to visit us, this is not a realistic car to use. The Mercedes station wagon is quite tight with two adults, then two kids in car seats, and then two parents visiting or siblings or whatever it ends up being. Now that Mercedes wagon does have a third row seat in the cargo area with seat belts that people can sit in, but it's really tight back there and it's not a realistic thing that like adult human beings want to sit in, especially elderly parents. It's just not gonna happen. So over the last few months when parents have come to visit us, we've had to take two cars pretty much every time we want to go anywhere outside of our neighborhood. You want to try a different playground a few neighborhoods away? Well, you're driving two cars there. It just seemed wasteful and silly to be in that situation, all piloted two vehicles to deep California, and I just didn't really want to keep doing that. So I wanted to find something that could comfortably carry four adults plus two little kids in baby seats plus a giant stroller. Now that is pretty easy to do without getting a giant massive thing with off-road tires. So as you can imagine, there was a little bit more to it than just that. The other thing about my Sequoia is that it's not just replacing my wife's Volvo XC60, but also the Toyota Land Cruiser that I just recently sold on Cars and Bits. I had used that Land Cruiser to go on all sorts of off-road adventures packed to the brim with people when I was on the East Coast, and the Sequoia needed to be able to do that as well. So I needed something that was big enough for a lot of people and capable off-roading, and I planned to drive this car every summer across the country from California to the East Coast and back. So I needed something that was relatively comfortable with good driver assist technology and that could easily and simply and reliably make that cross-country trip without breaking too much of a sweat. This was a bit of a controversial requirement because it eliminated pretty much all electric cars. So when I asked this question on Twitter, boy was that requirement controversial. Twitter has now become a bastion of bots and people who are obsessed with Elon Musk, and they were all pushing electric cars and specifically Tesla. You can drive cross-country in a Tesla! But not really the way that I drive cross-country. I have done this cross-country adventure many times for several years now, and when I do it, I go hard. I can make it from San Diego to Washington D.C. in about two and a half days. Last year when I was driving back from the East Coast, I made it from Manhattan in New York City to Oklahoma in a single day. When I'm going, I want to go. And getting an electric car would add probably at least a day of extra time on both sides of this trip. That's one more day of highways and hotels and bad roadside food just so I can have the privilege of driving a Ribbian. No thanks. And that's assuming that you can find chargers across the country, which frankly is a big if, at least given the current infrastructure situation. So with those requirements, big enough to seat at least six, off-road capable, cross-country-able, driving easily with good driver assist technology, there weren't really all that many options. The Chevy Tahoe Z71, very off-road capable, big, but Chevy doesn't offer supercruise in that model. Same deal with the Ford Expedition Kimberline and Ford's Blue Cruise. The Range Rover is just too ridiculously expensive. The Mercedes G-Wagon doesn't have enough seats. The Mercedes GLS doesn't go off-road. Nothing really seemed to check all of my boxes except for a small few group of car. Obviously, the Sequoia fits all of my requirements. And the only other cars that I figured out that checked all my boxes were the Jeep Grand Wagoneer and the Jeep Grand Cherokee L. And I seriously considered them, specifically the Grand Cherokee L. I got one, I test drove it, I checked it out, and I ultimately decided that although the Jeep has some real benefits, especially its smaller size, I think it looks better, it's cheaper, I just don't really trust a Chrysler product at the moment. I've heard some real horror stories about people who have bought those new Grand Cherokee Ls and various problems that they've had. And given that I'm driving this all the way across country to kind of a remote spot, I don't really want to get stranded anywhere dealing with the issues that can come up when you have a Chrysler. And so the Sequoia emerged as the obvious choice. Especially because I also think the Sequoia is more off-road capable than the Jeep, even if the Jeep didn't have its reliability issues. That stuff pushed the Toyota over the edge. Now, it's worth pointing out the Sequoia has its own well-documented issues that have been covered in reviews of this car, which have generally been fairly mediocre to positive, but not absolutely glowing. Sequoia reviews have not been totally off-the-charts positive, and I'll cover some of that stuff in a minute. The other thing that gave me pause about getting a Sequoia is that I have laughed at the Sequoia in the past. Very publicly, I've said, if you have a Land Cruiser, and I've had a couple, the Sequoia is beneath you. It's not on the same level, and I felt that for a long time. But Toyota has totally changed up its lineup, and frankly, what hit me recently is the Sequoia is now the Land Cruiser. This had a sticker price of over $82,000, and it's the most off-road capable vehicle of all of Toyota's SUVs. That's the Land Cruiser. My whole life, the Land Cruiser has been the big, expensive off-roader Toyota SUV, but now that position is occupied by the Sequoia. And indeed, a new Land Cruiser is coming out with a much lower price tag and a smaller size, slotted in a different spot in Toyota's lineup. If you want to buy the Land Cruiser from the old days, the big, top-of-the-range Toyota, frankly, that's the Sequoia now, and specifically the TRD Pro with all of its off-road stuff. So that is an explanation of how I ended up with the Sequoia TRD Pro. And I have to say, it feels awesome to replace a 1997 car, a 1998 car, a 2013 car, and a 2018 car, four vehicles, with one brand new 2024 car. My average vehicle age jumped significantly of the cars in my fleet, and it's just a lot less to deal with. Yes, this thing is a massive behemoth, ridiculously-sized, huge thing, but one massive, brand-new behemoth is still a lot less stuff to deal with and think about than four aging, smaller vehicles, which is what I had before. So, personally, I think it was a good move. I'm sure you will tell me that it wasn't in the comments below. And now, let me show you the quirks and features of my Sequoia. We start with the exterior color. White. Seems boring, but a lot of thought went into it. Toyota only offers the Sequoia TRD Pro in three colors. White, gray, or black. That's it. Now, every year they also offer a special TRD color, which is some bright thing that's really cool, and I have loved past TRD Pro colors, but for the Sequoia, in 23 it was bright orange, and in 24 it was sort of a muted orange. And as much as I truly love the orange 2015 4Runner TRD Pro color, it's just not right for this vehicle. Number one, it's a lot of orange, and number two, that's for a 4Runner. For someone who's like 26 and taking their dog up to the mountains to go hiking, I don't want to drive around my family in a bright orange thing, so white was the choice. I felt it was the best of the remaining colors. Now, speaking of the look of this vehicle, annoyingly, it has camouflaged wheel arch fender things, and they look absolutely ridiculous. This is so far from my personality, it's just crazy. And even worse, it has camouflaged seats. This is from the factory, and disappointingly, there is no way around it. You cannot get a TRD Pro without getting camouflaged wheel arches and camouflaged seats. It looks absurd, but now I'm a guy with a car that has camouflaged seats. Now, of course, I could have gotten a regular Sequoia and not a TRD Pro, but if you can get past the stupid camo stuff, this truck brings a lot to the table if you off-road frequently, which I do. For one thing, you get these cool wheels. Yeah, that's right. You also have off-road suspension. Look in there, you can see it's red, and that means it's tough and durable. No, it really does have a pretty significant off-road suspension setup, and obviously these all-terrain tires, they are called Falcon Wild Peaks, which sounds made up, but that's what they're called. You also have the TRD light bar in the grille, which will actually be surprisingly useful to me because I drive in rural areas with a lot of deer. In fact, I hit a deer with my previous car, my Land Cruiser, and so it'll be nice to be able to see a little bit more. But the real benefit of the TRD Pro Sequoia is the off-road gadgets. Toyota's multi-terrain select system and Toyota's crawl control system are both fantastic, and they have gotten me out of some pretty serious jams in the past, and I am thrilled to have it in my new car so it can do the same for me in the future. Now, it's worth pointing out you can get all of this stuff if you get a Sequoia TRD off-road. It also comes with most of these features, but what I discovered is it's only about $10,000, $12,000 cheaper, and I think the Pro is going to hold its value significantly better over the long term, and frankly, it's just cooler. I am climbing inside. There are more quirks and features to discuss. For one thing, I really like the technology in this car. Toyota isn't really a cutting-edge technology manufacturer, but they do a good job refining tech that's already out, and this car is a good example. The center touchscreen is perfect. It's huge. It's super high-resolution. It's tremendously easy to move around, intuitive, responsive. Frankly, it kind of matches perfectly with how I think that I want touchscreens to be. Above that, I also love that the rear-view mirror has a camera function. This is especially important for me because I'm going to pile this thing full of people, car seats, dogs, and all sorts of cargo and other equipment. You can't see out the back without this camera. This is a feature I wish that my Mercedes station wagon had, my other daily driver car, and I'm thrilled that I have it here. Now, with that said, one kind of laughable drawback about the tech in this car is the gauge cluster screen situation. You have a full-screen gauge cluster, and the left panel is very configurable. It shows the track you're playing. It shows vehicle info, all sorts of different stuff you could pull up over there, but the right panel is not configurable at all. You have a choice between three absolutely useless things. One is your vehicle's angle, so like how pitched or rolled it is on the trails. Okay, fine. Another is your turbo boost. If you wanted a boost gauge in your giant family SUV, you can see it in the right panel. And the final one is like an engine temperature gauge, but that's already displayed elsewhere in the screen, so it's just duplicative. And those are the only choices you have for that right screen. Of course, I want it to show me the music I'm listening to so I can have the tripodometer info on the other side, but that isn't available. Absolutely laughable. No one who designed this screen has ever actually used it. Now, with that said, beyond that, some other good stuff in here. I love the driver assist technology in this new Sequoia. Capacitive touch steering wheel holds its lane tremendously well. Very smooth braking and accelerating. It won't do automatic lane changing, and if it comes to a complete stop, you have to tap a button to get started again, which is annoying, but the system's operation is smoother and better than even my Mercedes station wagon. It's a great system, better than almost every other one out there, and that was a big priority for me, finding a car with good driver assist tech. The Jeep Grand Cherokee L has even better driver assist tech, and it's sad to lose some of what it offers, but this is almost as good and a fantastic system that will aid me in sitting in traffic here in Southern California and on my cross-country drive every summer. As for the rear seats, you can see captain's chairs back there. Camouflage captain's chairs, unfortunately, but they're there, and that's fine. I like the fact that it has built-in sunshades for the second row seats, and it even has built-in sunshades for the third row seats, which is a pretty big flex if you have a lot of infant passengers. They'll appreciate it, and indeed I do. And next up, we move on to the cargo area, which is the primary source of complaints about this car. When you read or watch reviews, most of the complaints are centered around the cargo area and how the third row sort of gels with the cargo area, so let's talk about it. One of the big complaints is the high load floor. Getting stuff over the bumper and into the cargo area is high in this vehicle because a lot of the hybrid system components for the powertrain are under the floor back here. I understand that criticism. I get it. It doesn't really apply to me. I have no problem lifting stuff into the back. I could see if you were older, more frail, not as strong, getting stuff back here could be an issue, but for me, it's not really a problem. The other big complaint about the rear here is there's not enough space given how massive this vehicle is, and I understand that. Although, it's worth pointing out there are some neat tricks that it employs. One is that the third row seats can slide forward and backwards, so if I have my two-year-old son back here, he doesn't need the legroom. I can push the seat all the way forward and get more cargo space, and that's a neat trick that other automakers don't offer. Of course, you can also fold the seats if you're not using the third row, and you have shelves back here, which is a cool touch. This floor can go higher on several different levels, so you can have two rows of cargo shelves in the back, which effectively doubles your cargo space if you have smaller items. It's kind of a clever trick that adds to the cargo capacity of the Sequoia behind the third row. It's also worth pointing out that one other feature I really like in the new Sequoia is the fact that the rear tailgate glass still opens up independently from the tailgate. You just saw the whole tailgate open. Well, here, I can open up the glass separately in case I want to put in a smaller item or reach in to grab something without going through the process of opening up the whole tailgate. Frankly, from that perspective, I think this whole thing is pretty well done, at least for my purposes. I can see the complaints, but this fits into my lifestyle reasonably well. With that said, the other big complaint about this vehicle is its price tag. It is expensive for what it offers, or so say the reviews. My response to this is, number one, it's not that much more expensive than its rivals. Everything in this segment has now gotten out-of-control expensive, but more importantly, this is just going to hold its value better. You look at the prices for eight 10-year-old Chevy Tahoes, and they're nowhere near what Sequoia's LandCruisers 4Runners sell for, and so you might pay a little more up front, but my view is you generally get that back, and you really should look at total cost of ownership for the actual cost of the vehicle, and not just up front purchase price. We'll see if that ends up being true when I go to sell this in a few years. And the other thing I really like about my new Sequoia is the powertrain, this i-Force Max V6. This is a turbocharged and hybrid V6 with about 440 horsepower, and it's fantastic. I've driven it in the new Tundra, now it's here in the Sequoia, and I think it's a great engine. The V8 is gone, but I owned a car with the outgoing V8, and I vastly prefer this V6. I have heard of some early reliability issues from early Tundra models that had this engine, but it seems like it's worked out for the 23 and 24 model years, and I look forward to driving this car with this engine because it really is excellent. So with that in mind, let's see how my new Sequoia drives. I'm going to take it out on the road and give you my impression. All right, driving my Sequoia TRD Pro with my camo seats, and a car seat back there, which is also really manly. Let's talk Sequoia TRD Pro. My first impression driving this vehicle is it is tremendously big. I am not a big car person, I've never owned a big car before. Had a new Land Rover Defender briefly, that's relatively large, but nothing like this. This is on a different level. Full-size, big body, giant thing, and it's certainly big to drive around town, and for me personally, I mean that's why I won't really be driving it around town all that much. We're going to use it on road trips, we're going to use it when family's visiting around town, but that's relatively rare, and then off-roading and other adventures like that. I suspect this gets maybe 10,000 miles a year, which will be relatively low for a Sequoia TRD Pro, because most of these get bought to use and use hard. Now, I am not really that into owning big vehicles, and so to me that's a drawback of this car, but there are a lot of benefits. Interior space is obviously one of them, like I mentioned before. Technology is actually surprisingly another. Toyota's infotainment system, especially with CarPlay, is really good. It's not perfect, it could be better, but it's just simple and easy and it does exactly what I want it to, and you still have separate actual buttons for climate control and for most stereo functions, which is what I personally like. I also absolutely love this powertrain. I'm a big V8 guy. I love V8s, I have V8s, I always have had V8s, but now my two daily driver cars both have hybrid six-cylinder engines, my Mercedes station wagon and this, and it's great. Both of these are really good six-cylinder powertrains. Basically, the way I look at it is the it's a V6, but then the hybrid component and the turbocharged component kind of fill in the gaps where a V8 would have, you know, dominated over a V6, and so it actually has the acceleration, the mid-range power, the punch, the performance of a V8. It feels like it, it sounds like it, it performs like it, it delivers like it. The fuel economy is not a lot better than a V8, to be perfectly honest, but from an acceleration standpoint, etc., you're really not giving up all that much. You are getting slightly better gas mileage, and what I presume is there's a better emissions profile, you know, that's probably a component of why they did it. Obviously, fuel economy must benefit in some senses. It's a really nice powertrain. I really like Toyota's driver assist technology. Capacitive touch steering wheel is the only way to go. It's really crazy to me that even Tesla still doesn't offer that. Just a steering wheel that you can kind of rest your hand on, and it knows that, and it kind of does what it's supposed to, and this one does it well. One thing I'm not thrilled with about the Sequoia is the ride quality. You go over bumps, and it's just, it bounces you around. It's really not ideal. It definitely doesn't feel like a luxury car, doesn't feel like an $82,000 car, whatever it costs. I really am of the opinion that the Sequoia has kind of replaced the Land Cruiser in Toyota's world. Now that the Land Cruiser has gone downmarket, and you can get a Sequoia for $80,000, but one thing the Land Cruiser always did a little better was it felt more like a luxury vehicle, and this doesn't. This feels more truck-like. Now, I wouldn't have bought a vehicle that had a trucky ride and a trucky feel, but my requirement that it was an off-roader kind of forced my hand. I also test drove the Jeep Grand Cherokee, and it was the exact same. It was bouncy over bumps, it was rough, and I think that's just the reality of having, like, off-road suspension travel, you know, off-road capabilities. It's just going to be a little bit harder to use on-road. It's just going to be a little bit bouncier, and that's a trade-off that I just had to do if I was going to try to combine the needs of several vehicles into one. It's cool. I like it a lot. I think it's a neat truck, and I'm kind of thrilled to have it. I really have always wanted to have a TRD Pro. It came out 10 years ago, and I always thought it was cool, and I'm thrilled that I'm finally in one, even though it's also sort of a, you know, family car, dad car kind of thing. It works well, and I plan to seriously exploit its off-road capabilities. And so that's my 2024 Toyota Sequoia TRD Pro. I never really saw myself driving a vehicle that's so massive and brawny and in-your-face, but it really does fit all of my needs better than basically anything else, and frankly, so far, I really like it. And now it's time to give my TRD Pro a Doug's score. And the Doug's score is here, 58 out of 100, beating out most of the other full-size SUVs I've reviewed, except for the Lincoln Navigator, which adds many more features and improved ride quality and materials. Overall, the Sequoia TRD Pro combines a lot of excellent qualities, namely Toyota reliability, a fantastic powertrain, lots of interior space, and off-road capability. Its big drawback is some packaging in the cargo area and its price tag, which has now taken over the mantle for the Land Cruiser as Toyota's top dog SUV.