FIRST DRIVE：New Toyota Land Cruiser vs Scotland

Do you know what that is? That is a Land Rover view. Balmoral is just over there. I suspect the late Queen used to rumble up and down these tracks in an old Defender. This is probably the only corner of the world the Land Rover still gets to call its own. Oops. This is the new Land Cruiser 250, the latest in a line of cars that dates back over 70 years and has bent the globe to its will. If you want a car that absolutely will not let you down, no matter how rough and remote it gets, look no further. It's almost cruel of Toyota to launch the Land Cruiser in Land Rover's backyard. But anyway, we are going to take this opportunity to find out what it's like by answering some questions about it, starting with this handy diagram. Originating in 1951, it was a parts bin special, the Land Cruiser tag not arriving until a few years later. By 1967, it was so successful that Toyota had started to separate things out. The station wagon range was the most civilised, even though to this day it still uses a separate body-on-frame chassis. The iconic 70 Series forms the heavy-duty range and has barely changed since the 70s. Super simple, super tough, a favourite with the UN and outback farmers. And then there's the light-duty range. And if you're thinking there's not much difference between station wagon and light-duty, you're right. Toyota has been gradually realigning them. Arguably one of the world's most global cars, Toyota has sold over 11 million Land Cruisers across 170 countries. What do you reckon? Is it mostly mechanical or essentially electric? I've parked it on an angle so you can have a look. Look at the amount of articulation we've got. We've even got the mudguard scraping on the ground down there, which means that when you come around the other side, as you can see from the angle, we've got a wheel properly in the air. Now, the reason that's good is because you can have a look and see exactly what is going on underneath here. You've got these giant chassis rails with the body completely separate on top. That is proper, tough, rugged design. And you've got this huge beam axle and all these bits of big metal doing stuff. And that's not all. Right, let me just open this door carefully and pick the bonnet up. Nice and easy to reach. Now, you can see I've already stuck it at an angle so you don't have to move and you can just see straight in. Hang on a second. Short bloke problem here. Can I reach up high enough to hook it in? I can. Now, what you're dealing with here is a 2.8-litre four-cylinder diesel. That's it. No hybrid, no petrol, nothing. They will do a 48-volt mild hybrid version of this next year. In some places in the world, you can have a full hybrid, but not in Europe. You've just got this. The GAF chassis that's shared with the 300 Series station wagon is 50% more rigid than before, boasting 84 extra weld points and 12 metres of extra glue. It's actually quite similar to Merck's G-Class underneath with double wishbones at the front, the beam back axle and no height-adjustable air suspension. Not durable enough, apparently. 201 horsepower, 369 pounds-foot of torque and mated to an eight-speed automatic gearbox. The message is clear here. I know it looks cool and desirable, but it's a workhorse underneath. Right, let's go and put it to a real test. Right, so you thought we'd start with all the gnarly off-road stuff. Well, of course, we will get there. But actually, with these clanking underpinnings and everything, it's road use that is likely to cause the Land Cruiser more problems. So is it civilised? Can you drive this every day? Well, the first point to make is that this is not like an Audi Q7 or a Volvo XC90. It still puts off-road use front and centre. So there's a lot of weight underneath, the beam axle at the back and everything. So the ride quality, you get a certain amount of shudder and shimmer and everything from it. But that chassis is now a lot stiffer and they've put a lot more sound deadening into it. And although you can hear the engine churning away, and actually, I find that really reassuring, the noise levels are fine. And there is sort of commendably little suspension noise and intrusion. So it doesn't feel harsh on the road. It just feels a bit ponderous. And look, let's face it, it's not going to be massively economical. Toyota hasn't done the figures for it yet. But I reckon it's an 80-litre tank. I reckon it'll do 30 to the gallon. You'll get 500 miles out of it. And that's key, isn't it? You just want to be able to get in this, sit in it, because it is really comfortable to sit in. The seats are fantastic. And the view out and everything in it is brilliant. You sit quite high. You've got this sort of flat expanse of bonnet with these higher sides on it. It makes it appear a big car to drive, and it is. But there's this sort of reassurance of these square edges and this actually quite cut-down side, so you can sort of see over when you're off-road. I suppose you can see over and down. Big mirrors, big upright A-pillars, nothing really gets in the way. You've got commanding view out from this. It's just big and easy to operate in here. Everything's got this sort of chunky vibe. Remember Tonka toys? It feels a bit like that in here. It's like you should have a Yorkie in the glove box. You do have to interact with a touchscreen, and that's pretty much as much of a pain in here as it is in any other car. But you do have a lot of switches and things to operate down here. Pride of Place goes to the mode select for the drive modes. And there is a sport mode in there. There are a lot of other modes, as we'll come on to. But sport mode, that's not something that a Land Cruiser needs. So it used to run a six-speed automatic. Now it's an eight-speed. It's got really early torque converter lock-up. So you're literally doing 1,500 revs. Maybe you get a bit of a kick down. Maybe you don't. It just surges on. It's not a fast car at all. But you can put it into manual, pull a paddle, lock it into gear, and then just let it go. And there's this sort of deep-hearted, honest performance to it where it just chugs away. And you get the feeling that you could stick a three-and-a-half-ton trailer on the back of this, and it would make not a jot of difference to the way it goes. I just like the fact this is still a genuine, proper Land Cruiser. And we are getting all of the weather all at once. Bit of snow, bit of sleet, wind coming in sideways. Proper Scottish weather. But then what do you expect? We're up in the Cairngorms, and it's just glorious up here. And this colour works so well in the landscape. You think it's only going to work in a desert, but no, it blends in perfectly up here. It's not composed. It's not sophisticated, but I love it. I love the sort of honesty and integrity to it that it does exactly what it claims to do. You know you could point it at any bit of what you can see out there, and you'd get through. So no, road use doesn't pose this any problems whatsoever. More treading on Land Rover's toes. Right, so what we got going on in here? Well, legroom is fine. It's not palatial, but it's fine. Middle passenger gets a bit of a rough deal with that big plinth there. But mainly, it just feels durable. Everything's wiped clean and easy. And then look at this. You can tip that forward because you've got seats six and seven in the back. So there you go. Seats six and seven. You get very little boot space with them, and actually there's not much space for passengers in there. Nice and mechanical there, but it's on an electric motor. They don't all, not all Land Cruisers have electric motors, but this one does. And it takes a long time to fold the seat. Still going. There you go. Giant great boot. Too many electric motors. The worry is that the new one might be some sort of retro pastiche. So let's drive an old one and see if some of that DNA has carried over. So this is the iconic 40 Series Land Cruiser that dates back to like 1960. Quite honestly, the thought of romping across deserts in this just blows my mind. It's not exactly comfortable. You've got twin leaf springs at either end and this sort of... Wow, it just feels... There's a lot of clanking going on in here. A lot of shudder and shake and not a lot of refinement. But it feels mechanically tough. Despite the doors rattling around, it feels tough. And the new one has that completely in common with it. No, actually, the new one feels way tougher than this. Oh my God. Wow. What a thing. What a thing this is. Find a gear. There we go. Third. Got four to play with and there's diagrams over there that tells you what to do with them. We're going to talk low tech and we're going to talk high tech. Low tech first. We've got pads here, either side of the cabin for your knees. So when you're rattling around off-road, you don't hit hard plastic. High tech. Down here on this pad of buttons, which does all your off-road controls, is SDM. Stabiliser Disconnect Mechanism. Basically, it disconnects the front anti-roll bar to give you more wheel travel. Not a lot of cars have that. The Ford Bronco is one of the very few. It's very useful. It gives you like 10% more articulation when you're off-road. So let's go and see what difference that makes. In a word, this thing is a beast off-road. It's absolutely unstoppable. I can play with different driving modes now. So I've got MTS, which I guess stands for Multi-Terrain System or something. But you press that, twist the dial, and then it's just like Land Rover's Terrain Control. You go for dirt, sand, mud, deep snow, automatic, whatever you want. I haven't done anything with the controls at all yet. I can. I've got permanent four-wheel drive. But one click back on this little knob here locks the centre differential. And then a push and another one drops it into low range gears. The other one I can do is I can press the button here to lock the rear diff as well. Unlike the G-Class, that's got a lockable front diff as well. This doesn't. This has just got a lockable rear. And then, of course, I've got the SDM, the Stabiliser Disconnect Mechanism. A lot of acronyms in here. Honestly, I don't think I'm going to need any of it. I mean, just rumbling along tracks, it just feels so tough. There's the way the suspension just cushions things but communicates. All that communication that I wasn't getting on road, I am now getting. And so you know exactly what each wheel is up to, what it's doing as it sort of churns across here. It's just so easy. And that steering, there's now no kickback through it. The gearbox, stick it into manual. And I love having the paddles here to have a pull on. And then the next thing I can do down here, if I press the DAC button, I think that's a Downhill Assist Control. I don't know. That's sort of like a hill descent. So it just stops you surging away from yourself. But like I said, I don't think I need any of it. I'm just going to stick it in automatic. And if I get stuck, I'll start fiddling with some levers. All these things, they're all like the outside, where they all have those separate bits that you can take off. If you damage one, you don't take off the whole bumper, you just take off a corner of it. It's the same in here. All these pads of bits have got separation a bit between them, so they don't rattle and squeak against each other. Just feels so together. And that suspension isolation, there's just very little noise coming from it. We do need to find something that's going to test it a bit more though. We are at this amazing Scottish estate. It's right next door to Balmoral. And Toyota haven't been prescriptive. They haven't said you've got to go and drive anywhere at all. They've just given us the list of the tracks and said, go anywhere you like, do whatever you like, crack on. And you know what? That just shows they have complete confidence in the Land Cruiser. It's a bit too easy, really. Aha, what's this? This is more like it, right. So now we're getting into it. You can hear the engine working a bit harder now. And it's pretty rocky and muddy. OK, tell you what, going up quite a severe slope here. I'm just going to stick it into neutral, drop it into low range. There we go. Nice and easy. Block the rear diff. And the giggles will disengage that anti-roll bar as well. Got all the little graphics. This is one of the things about it, actually, that's not great. All the graphics on the screen are quite small and hard to read. Oh, you can immediately feel that front is a bit more elastic. It's just letting you have, I think it's 10% more wheel travel, more axle travel. Just effortless. There's barely a scraper or knock from underneath. And you're looking at the sides and you've got lots of durable bits of plastic. You're not going to care if they get a bit scratched up. They're like, you're going to wear them like battle scarves. Well, this is pretty rough stuff. I'm struggling to find the terrain to test it out enough. So it's pretty uneven. It's quite slippery through here. Look at this. Massive great bog of mud. It's the colour of chocolate. Oh, here we go then. Into a bit of a bog. Ooh, that's quite deep. That's quite deep. Don't think it's going to trouble 700 millimetres of wading depth, though. So you don't need height adjustable suspension. All you need is a Land Cruiser. So are there any drawbacks to this thing off-road? Well, the graphics that show you everything are quite small on the screen. So they're a little bit hard to see. And I haven't figured out how to stop the parking sensors coming up and interfering. But in terms of the mechanics of it, all those vagaries of driving it on the road just become so connected when you're off-road. And in that, it is different from the Defender, which feels so competent and composed that it seems to do everything for you. In this, you're more aware of what it's trying to do. If you think you can only get your kicks by driving fast around racetracks, bring a Land Cruiser off-road. It's brilliant. Oh, I think we're coming down to a little river crossing. This is just a car that has your back in any situation you like. I'm so impressed with it. It's got a level of sophistication that's new for the Land Cruiser. It is a much smoother car to drive now. So number one rival has got to be the Defender, right? It's not as smooth, competent and refined as a Defender. They've done really good things to that Defender. It's a very impressive bit of kit. But it has lost its reputation as a wilderness truck. The Defender is now basically a school-run special, which I think is probably great for JLR's bottom line now, but bad for its future reputation. Then you've got the Mercedes G-Class, which is superbly engineered and terrifically capable, but it starts at £130,000. And that alone, plus its reputation as an urban cruiser, means you just don't see them working for a living. They're too precious. Then you've got the Ineos Grenadier, which at £76,000 is too much money. And it's also more agricultural than this by quite a considerable degree. It wants to be durable and robust, and it's basically just a good update of an old Defender. But the trouble is that the Land Cruiser has the reputation for durability and robustness that the Grenadier really wants. And also the Land Cruiser has stayed truer to its origins than either the Defender or the G-Class. This new Land Cruiser is absolutely tremendous. I am blown away by it. Prices are going to start at about £50,000. And these first editions, which I think have actually got more kit than you want or need, will be about £65,000. 3,000 of those are coming to Europe. And if you have one, discover what it's capable of. The Land Cruiser has the reputation it does because they've always been used properly. Don't let the side down.