Here's Why The Toyota Land Cruiser 80 Series Is an SUV Icon

this is a 1997 toyota land cruiser and it is one of the most loved suvs of all time there are a lot of reasons for that and today i'm going to review this land cruiser and i'm going to explain them and i'm also going to show you why this is an suv icon [Music] i've borrowed this land cruiser from a viewer here in orange county in southern california and i'm going to start with a little overview now the original land cruiser came out back in the 1950s and the first ones looked like a jeep and indeed it was basically japan's version of a jeep a little utilitarian off-roader with no creature comforts for farmers and the military over the years the land cruiser has evolved considerably a four-door version came out in the 1960s and it soon began to attract the interest of families who lived in snowy climates or went on ski trips the 80 series land cruiser this one came out in north america for the 1991 model year and by then it was one of toyota's flagship models beginning its reputation as a range rover rivaling luxury family car for the wealthy but it wasn't just comfortable the 80 series land cruiser is also incredibly capable all north american 80 series land cruiser models used a six cylinder which is tremendously reliable these can easily go for many hundreds of thousands of miles without needing major repairs they've also become a favorite for off-roaders and overlanders which has jacked up prices considerably these days a low mileage land cruiser from this era which is defined as anything with less than 150 000 miles can easily sell for 15 to 25 000 or more which is a lot of money to pay for a 25 year old toyota but the 80 series deserves it because it's nearly impossible to find a better combination of capable off-road and comfortable and reliable but that's exactly what this is and today i'm going to review it first i'm going to take you on a tour of the 80 series and i'm going to show you all of the interesting quirks and features of one of the iconic suvs then i'm going to get it out on the road and drive it and then i'm going to give it a doug score all right i'm going to start the crooks and features of the 80 series toyota land cruiser with this one's biggest quirk and that would be the fact that it isn't a toyota land cruiser at all in fact it's a lexus this is a lexus lx 450 which came out for the 1996 model year and it was sold for only two years before the landcruiser and the lexus version were completely redesigned for 1998. now before you go accusing me of using the stronger land cruiser name to get clicks in my defense the lexus lx 450 is probably the single most pathetic rebadging of any vehicle ever in the entire history of luxury brands allow me to explain what i mean on the outside the only real difference between the land cruiser and the lexus version was the grill and a slight tweak to the headlights here is the toyota land cruiser grill and front end from this era and here is the lexus lx450 you can't tell the difference yeah neither can i except this one has a lexus badge the other exterior differences were really subtle the lexus version had a couple of distinctive unique colors a lot of the lexuses were gold because that was a popular lexus color at the time and that color wasn't offered on the land cruiser and there was also a slight difference to the cladding on the lower body on the outside of the lexus models but in terms of exterior stuff that was it it was otherwise just a land cruiser and there weren't very many differences between the lexus and the land cruiser on the inside either in here there were only four real changes one the lexus version got wood trim but it was only a small amount of wood trim and that was a pretty small detail when you think about it two the lexus came standard with leather upholstery it was an option on the land cruiser but by 95 almost everybody was getting it so that wasn't really a change either the other differences were the lexus had automatic climate control and the lexus had the lexus premium sound system otherwise this was a toyota land cruiser with a lexus premium sound system and that was it and to make this rebadged job even more pathetic toyota basically made no effort to hide this vehicle's toyota routes there are way more toyota logos and badges throughout this car than there are lexus ones for example open the door you see this vin tag it says toyota all surrounding it there are vin tags all throughout the car that say that same thing you can see on the glass it says toyota on every single window they didn't even bother to change that writing so that it says lexus to me probably the craziest thing they didn't bother to change was the wheels because they're so easy to swap out take the toyota ones off change the design put the lexus ones on not that hard but they didn't the lx450 has the exact same wheels as the toyota land cruiser which made telling apart the lexus version on the street surprisingly difficult i think that this is the only lexus that has ever shared its wheels with a toyota so you didn't even have that feature distinguishing your lexus from its toyota counterpart now the amazing thing is they actually charged more for this for wood trim a different grill a lexus premium sound system and basically nothing else you paid 7 000 more this was 48 000 when it was new and a land cruiser started at 41 000 so they were really hoping that lexus brand name carried some weight now you may be wondering why did they do this especially crazy because in the early 90s lexus went to great lengths to distinguish its vehicles from their toyota counterparts in order to prove that they were a different brand the reason is because toyota wanted its lexus luxury brand to have a luxury suv as soon as possible the range rover was already on sale and doing pretty well the land rover discovery had recently been introduced infiniti was coming out with a new qx4 that was essentially a luxury version of the nissan pathfinder and acura was debuting the slx which was an acura luxury version of the isuzu trooper toyota knew that its lexus rx suv was in development and of course that would become groundbreaking when it debuted a few years later but it didn't come out till 99 and toyota wanted some of that sweet luxury suv cash so they did the most half-hearted automotive rebadge ever charged people seven grand more for it and poof they had a luxury suv but anyway moving on to the rest of the quirks and features of the 80 series i'm going to start with one of the most interesting things which is it's crazy to see what passed for luxury in 1997. it wasn't that long ago but this luxury suv had no cup holders they didn't offer them these are aftermarket cup holders made by an 80 series enthusiast because people who drive these cars now want that feature but you couldn't get it on your luxury suv back then here's another item that's unthinkable by modern standards the center console storage area isn't in the center it's actually offset towards the passenger side so they could have room for the parking brake which takes up entirely too much space modern cars have an electronic parking brake that's like a button this thing you had to actually relocate the entire center console in order to make room for the parking brake with that said the center console is nice and luxurious because it is a split level you have an upper center console storage area and a lower center console storage area so you had luxurious multiple storage options by the way speaking of the center console it's worth noting that the console has like a little wart coming off it near the back on the driver's side i think that was intended to be a cup holder but it wasn't in the shape of a cup so interesting idea but no next up here's another place where i'm shocked at this pass for luxury and that would be the gear lever you look at the gear lever and the piece below it and you can see it doesn't really fit into this interior and that's because toyota used this gear lever and the base with the gear display in many different vehicles at the time the land cruiser on the lexus but also in trucks and buses and other vehicles and they didn't want to go through the trouble of designing a different gear lever to fit with each vehicle's interior so they just stuck this one in everything it doesn't fit looks totally out of place and it would be unthinkable now but at the time it's just how they did it and next up directly next to the gear lever you can see there is a button for the rear seat climate control you can turn it to low or high but if you look closely at that button you can see it's not climate control but actually just heat the rear seat passengers could get air but not air conditioned cold air you could only give them heat again crazy that passed for luxury back then next up here's the feature i've always loved about the 80 series that would be its power antenna now you turn on the radio in this vehicle and the antenna automatically goes up that was common of a lot of 90s cars the cool thing here was you had buttons in the center control stack where you could control the position of the antenna so you press this down button and then the antenna will actually go down if you don't want it to be up anymore and then you want it to go back up press up and it goes back into place now i might be thinking why would anybody want this the reason is car washes in every other 90s car you had to turn your radio off when you went into a car wash because the antenna would snap off but in the land cruiser you could leave your radio on but put the antenna down and continue listening a very luxurious feature and next up another ultra luxurious feature is the key remote this vehicle had a remote entry back in 97 that was a pretty big deal especially for an suv but take a look at the remote there's two buttons and they're unlabeled and amazingly the top one is both lock and unlock you press it it locks you press it again it unlocks which makes you wonder what the bottom button is i assume it's the panic button and i don't want to set off the alarm but the point is that was 90s luxury really though the biggest thing that strikes me about how crazy 90s luxury seems today is just how utilitarian this interior is there's no swoopy lines or really any attempt at style in here everything is in boxes fixed in place a lot of plastic different colors nothing really matches it's crazy to think that in just a little over 20 years we've come so far for luxury vehicles because this wouldn't even pass for an economy car interior today and next up i mentioned it was capable and it really is you can see in the center console you have the second gear lever here that's for low range driving in case you get onto a really rough trail you can put it in low range and it'll help get you out more important for off-roading though to the left of the steering wheel you have a little dial that is for your differential lock you can use that to lock the wheels so they all rotate at the same speed which can be very useful when you're off-roading but the most impressive thing here is that this 80 has that differential locker at all it was an option in both the land cruiser and the lexus version and most people didn't get it there was no point they knew they'd just be using this to drive around their children to school and not take it off-road but these days 80 series models with the differential locker sell for a huge premium because it makes them far more attractive for off-roading and for overlanders who want to modify these and take them deep into the wilderness and next up we move on to the back seat of the 80 series and the first interesting quirk back here is the cd changer the lexus lx 450 had only three options the differential lock which this one has the power sunroof which this one has and the cd changer which this one has but it's located in the back seat for some reason you can see it's near the floor between the two front seats at the back of the center console that's where you insert your six cds this was in the days before they had enough room to integrate an in-dash cd changer so automakers look for other places to put it a couple of other items worth noting about the rear seat one the rear seat passengers had individual armrests you could put down these middle armrests individually which is actually pretty rare even really nice luxury cars today often have a shared armrest but not the lx450 and rear seat passengers also had individual ashtrays you had them on the door on the driver's side you have an ashtray and again on the passenger side you have an ashtray multiple ashtrays for your multiple rear seat passengers so you could be driving along with your kids in the back and they could be smoking and next up speaking of the back seats i want to talk about third row seat access which in the 80 series was an unmitigated disaster okay if modern three-row suvs there is an emphasis placed on third row access that preserves the shape of the second row and that way you don't have to get your car seat out of the second row every time you want to load a passenger into the third row makes sense in this thing the shape is not preserved the first thing you have to do is drop down the seat back completely all the way down then there's a second latch that allows you to fold the second row completely forward and that was the only way to gain third row access there was no sliding the seat forward back here like there is in basically everything today now this was commonplace back in the 90s this was how you got into third rows but it's crazy by modern standards and next up i want to talk about the third row from the cargo area but that means getting back here so first i want to discuss the tailgate which is notable because it is a split tailgate the upper part opens and then the lower part opens separately which i've always loved because it means you don't have to open the whole thing if you just want to load in a couple of groceries and you can also sit on the lower part which is nice if you want to have a picnic by the beach or at a park or if you want to tailgate at your favorite sporting event you can sit here which is great i really think all suvs should have this split tailgate thing and now that we're back here you can see why i wanted to talk about the third row seats from the cargo area because the third row is folded up on the side of the cargo area and it is essentially cargo this vehicle came from the days before full flat third row seating and all these automakers were experimenting with different ways to kind of put away the third row seat some automakers had a third row bench seat and if you wanted it to go away you had to physically remove it from the vehicle toyota had what they thought was a brilliant better idea the third row folds and then you can fold it away and clip it to these grab handles in back and then it was out of place now the benefit here was you didn't have to physically remove the third row seat to give yourself more cargo room which was especially a problem if you were not at home and you had nowhere to leave the third row seat but the drawback is obvious it stole your rear visibility in a ridiculous way so you really couldn't see into your blind spot back here but it was a way to give you more cargo space and keep the third row in the vehicle amazingly toyota still does this in a new 2020 land cruiser the seats still fold up to the side like this very bizarre but it was a lot more unwieldy back in the 90s and by the way even though the third row clearly wasn't the place to sit or to access you did have one cool party trick as a third row passenger in an 80 series land cruiser you had these cool sliding windows that you could open like you were on safari it was way cooler than any other third row opening window back in the 90s you didn't have it on too many vehicles but you had it on this one and next we move up here but before i talk about the engine i want to talk about the styling i've always liked the look of the 80 series land cruiser although i never really loved it i always felt the wheel arches were a little too big and the front looked a little unfinished but i always admired the simplicity of this design just sort of a regular boxy understated suv and that has been a hallmark of the toyota land cruiser for more than 30 years now the land cruiser is designed to last for decades thanks to its ultra-reliable over-built mechanicals so toyota never gives the land cruiser too much of a trendy flash in the pan design because the car will outlast it and as a result the land cruiser always has looked simple understated elegant and that helps it age well but anyway let's talk engine now i mentioned earlier that all north american 80 series land cruiser models used a six cylinder when they first came out in 91 it was a four liter six cylinder with only 155 horsepower in a vehicle this size it was over matched and people complained endlessly about how slow those early land cruiser models were so in 93 toyota switched to a 4.5 liter six cylinder that made about 215 horsepower and they used that engine through the rest of the life cycle of the 80 series land cruiser and the lexus lx450 by the way one thing i like when you look at this engine it is absolutely covered in toyota badges basically everywhere you look toyota toyota toyota but on the very top in the middle you do have one large lexus badge because this is a lexus no seriously it is please believe us and finally i want to briefly talk about the literature that came with this vehicle and i want to start with the 1997 lexus accessory collection pamphlet where they try to get you to buy vehicle accessories to make even more profit from you the very best line in this pamphlet comes on page 41 where they try to sell you running boards for the lx450 by saying seasoned sport utility vehicle owners make running boards one of their first accessory editions before embarking on serious outdoor adventures actually seasoned sport utility vehicle owners remove the running boards first when embarking on a serious outdoor adventure because they get in the way but either way it seems their language worked because the original owner of this car got the running boards and you can see they are still mounted on there to enhance your serious outdoor adventure the other interesting item in here is in the owner's manual pouch not the manual itself which is pretty boring but you can see the spare key is still sitting in its original spare key pouch that says lexus on it never been taken out of there for when this car was bought new 23 years ago and so those are the quirks and features of the 80 series toyota land cruiser or lexus lx450 now it's time to get it out on the road and see how it drives all right driving the 80 series land cruiser now before i drive it's worth noting that in 98 the year after this one the land cruiser was redesigned became the 100 series and the lexus and the land cruiser were differentiated considerably more and since then they've been doing a better and better job of making them different now two big things stand out to me driving this uh immediately and the first is the driving position you're high up uh you have a really good view everywhere excellent visibility all around you the other thing that really stands out to me right away is how simple this vehicle is and feels compared to modern ones the driving feel is simple you press the gas you hear the engine there's no electronic stuff looking around the reason the visibility is so good the windows are low there's not airbags everywhere you look in the gauge cluster no screen simple gauges old school everything in here just feels way simple compared to modern vehicles uh and more technologically advanced ones now for a lot of the people who still own these that's one of the main things that they like about them um the 100 series the next generation land cruiser was a much better car but it got more tech and that was also true mechanically which is another reason why people like these they're very easy to work on they're easy to find parts for big engine bay easy to do stuff yourself not that many electronics now one big downside with this vehicle and i generally like the boxy styling i like the simplicity i like the driving position but a big downside is with these old-school vehicles fuel economy is atrocious absolutely atrocious the owner told me he gets about 11 miles per gallon and the problem is you don't get the benefit of that it's not like a fast car like fast exotics get 11 miles per gallon amg mercedes but they're fast this isn't that so it's slow and it's inefficient which is one of the biggest problems in my mind with the landcruiser even today i've always wished for a land cruiser that was efficient and hopefully the next generation version will be that it is to me really amazing that this was considered a nice luxury car back in 97. so the sticker price on this was around 48 you added the options which this one has a few accessories you're probably in the low 50s that likely translates to 80s today in today's money maybe even 90. and it's unbelievable to me that someone could have spent that kind of money on this piece of crap now i love this vehicle but i love it for what it has become which is a simple fun vehicle that off-roaders like uh but i can't imagine going into the dealer and dropping 90 on this just proof that 90s cars had a long way to go but if you wanted a luxury suv there weren't that many options at the time you could get a land rover which sucked you could you could get a uh or you could get a few other rebadged models that really weren't all that good the land cruiser was a purpose-built excellent luxury suv ultimately i think the reason people still really love this is because it has it's an unbelievably small sweet spot between uh modern and classic not too many vehicles pull this off and of course they didn't design it to pull this off it just aged that way it is comfortable enough to be usable every day it is quick enough to keep up with traffic which you can't really say about the predecessor land cruiser to this the 60 and 62 models it has the third row seat it has nice leather it has just enough creature comforts climate control air conditioning to be a reasonably usable vehicle but at the same time it also still feels like kind of an old-school classic truck like an old land cruiser or an old grand wagoneer and of course nobody wants to daily drive those those things are crap this is just good enough to be usable every day and it's just bad enough to be cool and kind of special and not feel like you're just sitting in a big highlander and i think that's the secret to the success of the 80 series and so that's the 80 series toyota land cruiser or lexus lx 450 or lexus land cruisers a lot of enthusiasts now call it the next generation land cruiser was called the 100 series and it was objectively a much better vehicle than this but it was softer and more family oriented and more luxurious the 80 series was a great combination of off-road capable truck and comfortable family hauler and ultra reliable companion a combo that may never really exist again quite like this anyway with that now it's time to give the 80 series a doug score starting with the weekend categories and styling the 80 series is okay but i've never loved the oversized cartoonish fenders it's close to being gorgeous but the xj cherokee looks nicer and simpler it gets a six out of ten acceleration it's slow and it gets a one out of ten handling is okay nothing more and it gets a three out of ten fun factor is okay it's not much fun on the road but capable and exciting off-road and it gets a decent 4 out of 10. cool factor is merely average these are special but they're common enough that it's not that cool just yet and it gets a 5 out of 10 for a total weekend score of 19 out of 50. next up are the daily categories and features this was loaded in 1997 but it's low on tech by today's standards and it gets a 3 out of 10. comfort is fine but it's not especially plush and it gets a 4 out of 10. quality is good these are exceptionally reliable amazingly so but the actual material quality is kind of mediocre and it gets a 7 out of 10. practicality it's pretty good big enough and lots of seats and cargo space but fuel economy is just so abysmal it only gets an 8 out of 10. finally value and these are expensive nice ones can be fifteen or twenty thousand dollars in great shape but for a cool reliable practical suv that's fast becoming a vintage icon i think that's kind of a bargain and it gets an eight out of ten for a total daily score of 30 out of 50. add it up in the doug score is 49 out of 100 which places it here against other relevant vehicles obviously the 80 series land cruiser doesn't beat modern toyota suvs and trucks but it's not as far off as you might think and it beats out the few older suvs i've tested that are sorta competitors these land cruisers are awesome trucks and they're deserving of their increasingly iconic status [Music] you

Channel: Doug DeMuro

Views: 1,203,344

Keywords: toyota land cruiser, land cruiser review, fzj80, fzj 80 review, fzj80 land cruiser, 80 land cruiser, 80 series land cruiser, toyota land cruiser review, lexus lx450 review, toyota fzj80 review, 80 series, doug demuro, demuro, doug de muro

Id: MIeYJrX1a-k

Length: 26min 54sec (1614 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 30 2020