Toyota Tundra | Brutally Honest Long-Term Owner Review

hey youtube ian from big rock moto and outdoors so i've got another car review for you guys today so this is a long-term real world owner's review of the toyota tundra the model that i'm reviewing today is a 2011 model i bought this truck new back in 2011 i owned it for four or five years and then since that point i sold it to my dad i think around 2015 or so and he's owned it until now so it's been in my family this entire time since it was new it has 90 000 miles on it and today i'm going to give you the full review of this truck so here's how we're going to do this i'm going to give you a brief overview of toyota's history with full-size trucks then i'm going to talk about why i chose this over the competing trucks we'll look at the exterior talk about things i like and don't like about it we'll talk about the interior the things i like and i don't like we'll talk about livability practicality and functionality of the truck we'll talk about some driving impressions then we'll go into the dislikes and some issues that we've had with it and i'll end by with final thoughts and talking about what i buy this truck again toyota's history with pickup trucks in the united states actually goes back all the way to 1968. however up until 1993 it was just small pickup trucks that toyota had in 1993 they introduced the toyota t-100 toyota knew that america needed a larger truck something larger than the small trucks that they had while the t-100 seemed small by today's comparison it was actually pretty sizable back then they offered v6 engines they didn't have a v8 engine and that was one of the reasons why it never became too popular they did offer an eight foot long bed which pleased contractors and workers the t-100 of that generation is pretty legendary for its overall reliability and durability the t100s final year in the us was 1998. now during this time toyota knew that america wanted even a larger and more powerful pickup truck so in the year 2000 they introduced the toyota tundra the 2000-2006 tundra was pretty much a full-size truck although again by today's standard it seems a little bit smaller toyota finally offered different cabs you can get four doors you can get a larger v8 engine which was a really big thing at least in the united states and you started to see the introduction of things like leather upholstery and some higher end features that truck buyers were starting to demand it really wasn't until 2007 with the introduction of the current generation tundra that toyota really went full size full american truck so in 2007 the tundra was all new it was larger it was more powerful they did have a v6 and two different v8 engine options to choose from you could get a standard cab a double cab or a crew cab toyota's marketing at the time really focused on the truck's durability its toughness and of course its towing and hauling ability and how it compared really well to the american trucks of the time which it really did it was built very stout it had very strong power trains and with toyota's reputation for reliability it was an immediate success however success in a full-size truck world is a relative term because they never took the market dominance that trucks like the f-150 silverado and sierra and the ram 1500 enjoyed they did update the tundra styling in 2014 made it edgier made it more of a square style and i think looked better than the 2007 to 2013 truck however the tundra that you buy today in 2020 is really basically the same truck underneath as it was in 2007 and that's not a bad thing as we're going to find out however one thing that's going to keep coming through this video is how they really haven't kept up with their competitors in terms of refinement luxury features ride quality and other factors okay so why did i choose this truck over the competitors back in 2010 2011 during that time so at that point i had a small trailer i did a lot of dirt biking a lot of motorcycling so i was always hauling motorcycles around i needed to pull a small trailer and just do general truck duties when i bought this truck it was actually the first pickup truck that i'd ever owned so at the time i was very close to buying a toyota tacoma but when i looked at the functionality the features and the hauling ability and just overall ability of the tacoma versus this truck considering they were almost the same price back then and we'll explain that i ended up getting this now since i've had this truck i've had mid-size trucks i've had the chevy colorado i've also owned other full-size trucks so i'll link to my f-150 review right down below here but i've also had a gmc sierra i've driven all the other trucks including the newer gmc sierras and silverados i've driven the older generation titans the one that they made back when this was made so i have a lot to compare to some other reasons i got this i mentioned the value of it so i think this truck i think i paid around thirty five thousand dollars brand new for this truck back in 2011. i also really like the resale value of toyota trucks they're incredible they're some of the best resell of any vehicle you can buy in the planet another thing i liked about this truck and what i still appreciate about it is that it's built in america it's always been built in america and the engine and transmission are also built in america so it's not just the parts that are made here but the truck is assembled here by american workers and that's something i really appreciate even though toyota is obviously a japanese company the fact that they do so much business in the us is really a great thing you could make an argument that this truck almost is more american than some of the american trucks which oftentimes are building canada mexico or other countries and then imported here so the competitors to this truck are pretty obvious right you've got the ram 1500 you've got the f-150 you've got the silverado and the sierra and i suppose you can throw in the titan as well although unfortunately no one buys titans anymore since this generation was brought out in 2007 even though it was pretty really competitive and really awesome vehicle back in 2007 it still is an awesome vehicle and we'll get to why that is it actually has fallen quite a bit behind the competition in terms of refinement in terms of powertrain choices in terms of fuel mileage in terms of interior quality and features luxury features and a lot of the things that modern truck buyers want now where it still is ahead a lot of those is in reliability toughness practicality and just how well it works as just a truck we'll get to this kind of later in the video but if you want a truck that just does basic truck duties and you don't care about a lot of fancy stuff and you want something to last as long as possible you probably want this truck full-size trucks have become luxury vehicles with things like heated and cooled seats and huge navigation screens and moon roofs and hot running boards and all sorts of fancy stuff that you can get now i'm the biggest offender of this i own an f-150 platinum and i'll put that link down below here but when i get in driving my dad's truck what used to be my truck after driving my f-150 i really appreciate just how good it works as a regular truck as a and i don't know how much i would miss a lot of the luxury stuff i don't think i would miss most of it that much to be honest so let's talk about exterior styling for a minute now as i've said in my other videos exterior styling is completely subjective it's about what your opinion is i mean obviously there are polarizing vehicles out there some that most people agree look terrible and some most people agree look really good but then most vehicles kind of fall somewhere in the middle now when we look at the exterior of the tundra now this is the body style they had between 2007 and 2013. obviously like i mentioned in the history section they did update the body a little bit in 2014. to my eye these these first generation of of this version of tundra is a little bit too rounded for me the whole truck just looks a little bit bulbous and just a little bit too round on all the edges but that's just my opinion your opinion may vary and that's fine some things i should mention about this particular truck this was a package offered i think for only two or three years called the trd rock warrior package and basically it was kind of like an sr5 level kind of truck um a little bit lower than the trd off-road uh and it wasn't up to level like a limited or something like that but what you got was the forged toyota trd 17 inch rims larger sidewall tires you got different shocks although the height of the truck was the same as the regular trd you also got blacked out fenders and some different styling cues so it looks uh you didn't have any chrome you didn't have any silver really if you really have a keen eye and you know these trucks well you'll notice that the rims look a little bit different than the factory rims the only reason for that is that when i owned the truck i took off the silver lining pieces on the outside i'll put up a picture here but i unbolted those they just come right off and i think the truck looked a lot better without them let's jump into the interior impressions on the tundra now in terms of how this is held up it's held up actually really really well there's a few tiny spots where the finish on some of the buttons is worn off you know but overall this this interior is proven to be really durable over almost the past 10 years and that's a good sign for the future because i know my dad plans to keep this truck for a very very very long time some things you'll notice about the tundra interior is that they designed it to use with gloves on so you've got these huge climate control knobs big four-wheel drive knob the shifter handle is gigantic and everything in this interior this truck is just big but it's also very functional it's easy to clean you always know where something is and the night being able to use things with winter gloves on is actually a really nice feature this is in stark contrast to how the controls on my f-150 work on math 150 the buttons are so tiny that first of all you're not going to use them with gloves and second of all there's so many darn buttons in that thing that if someone like my dad got in that he'd be just way overwhelmed so i guess what i'm saying is i appreciate the simplicity of design here it's not luxurious it's certainly not going to win any awards for luxury or features but it's fine now you have to remember this was 2011 when this truck was sold so you've got a cd player there's no tape player thankfully you've got the old school auxiliary input for this stereo of course you know if you own this truck if i still on this truck i'd probably change the head unit put in a bluetooth head unit you've got basic things up here like a basic clock and temperature gauge but really the instruments are very simple the readouts are very easy to use and you just really won't have any complaints the truck has a lot of really good practical storage spaces the center console is storage is huge with lots of different compartments in here it's got two glove boxes which i think is great really useful thing there you've got a lot of cubbies a lot of cup holders on the doors storage is really good in this truck and actually i think it's better than my my new f-150 is in terms of seating comfort um i did a lot of long trips with this truck out to play out to uh colorado like thousand mile drives and things like that i found the seats to be really quite comfortable in this truck now i don't often get along with seats and toyota vehicles but these were pretty good they're probably not as good as the seats on my f-150 but they do have good lumbar adjustment i do think it's funny that the seats are all manual adjustment which is actually kind of good because it's one less thing to break but the lumbar support is actually power so i thought that was kind of interesting but the lumbar support i adjusted on my drive up here to my house and it's actually really really good let's jump into the back seat okay so now i'm in the back of the double cab tacoma now the double cab is an extended cab in any other words right so what the nice thing about this layout or this truck is that you can get the six and a half foot bed which is standard with or you can actually get you don't see too many of them but you can get the double cab with a big full-size eight-foot bed which is an awesome thing for many of you who are in construction or trades or just want the full-size bed now in terms of leg room here in the back it's actually really really impressive for what you consider an extended cab truck this is also another reason why the tundra really convinced me back in 2011 to buy this the leg room the rear leg room and the double cab and i've got this front seat pretty far back with plenty of room for the person in front of me i've still got a couple inches in front of my knees and i'm 5 foot 11. the actual leg room is 34.7 inches in the back seat now i looked up the specs for the f-150 in the extended cab now granted you don't see any extended cab f-150s but that's what you would need to compare this to and that has about an inch and a half less legroom than this so you know that's a noticeable amount more in the tundra so really good packaging the toyota got all this back room here with the extended cab still putting a six and a half up bed and still keeping the length of the truck uh the same as the other trucks uh in his class nothing else too crazy in here back here in the back you've got some cup holders to flip out you've got a basic 12 volt power outlet and uh nothing else because you know what you don't need anything else but i will show you the storage under the seat which i like okay so let me show you the storage back here so the rear seat goes up and down just like this it flips up here towards the back of the truck and when you do this you've got this nice big storage bin under here i think this was an option but i can't remember but in any case you get all this nice storage area underneath both sides it's really really really handy i really like that and then just fold your seat back down super simple now if you wanted a totally flat load floor back here you could get it almost flat you'd have to take these boxes out one more quick thing i wanted to mention about the tundra double cab which i like is that you've got a rearward opening door or a standard opening door right so it opens like a normal car door as opposed to some of the extended cab trucks still where you have to open the front door first and then the door is kind of like a clamshell opens backwards now that has some advantages where maybe if you're loading cargo your door kind of flips back against the bed here i'll put a picture of that my sierra had that feature but i think for actual everyday use for people getting in and out the traditional door opening is actually better here so let's talk about some of the practicality usability functionality of this truck so i've mentioned a few things already i really like the six and a half foot bed on this double cab truck it's a good bed size it's not quite it doesn't make the truck super long like the eight foot bed but it's a heck of a lot more usable from someone like me who owns a five and a half foot bed on my f-150 with the short bed although i do the bigger cab i really really miss having this longer bed and if i get another full-size truck in the future which i certainly will i will be going back to the six and a half foot bed no matter what brand i choose how about towing and hauling so that's one thing where the tundra has always really excelled ever since it came out now yes modern day competitors can brag that oh maybe they have a thousand pounds more towing capability but you know what that's really not that meaningful and there's a few reasons why when you see the advertised towing figures for full-size trucks or any vehicle it's only going to be in a very very specific configuration usually with the least amount of options the lightest cab and drivetrain configuration and engine and things like that so you really have to dig deeper into what the towing rating of a specific truck actually is and a lot of times a tundra will have a higher or at least equivalent tow rating to some of the brand new full-size trucks because of those things the advantages that the tundra does have is that at least with a 5.7 liter v8 it has they all come with a 4.3 rear end now the 430 rear end means that you basically have a better gear for towing now combined with a really strong six-speed transmission this truck is really really capable for towing it's very very popular for people who tow travel trailers rvs or even small fifth wheels a few other things i want to mention about it turning radius so when you own a big vehicle like this turning radius is something that really matters now this truck has around a 44 foot turning radius that puts it in between the rams which have around a 40 41 foot turning radius and something like my f-150 which is really bad at like 47 to 48 feet now when i drive my dad's truck here compared to my modern day f-150 i really noticed that especially if you've noticed i have a really tight circular driveway up here in the mountains this thing i can wheel this thing around so much easier than my f-150 and that's something i really miss about this truck so they did a really good job engineering the suspension geometry to allow you to get that steering lock in terms of living with this truck doing the maintenance on it reliability those kind of factors i mean it's a toyota truck so what do you expect it's really easy to work on nothing ever breaks hardly and it's just a super really it's just a really great ownership experience for the long term so what are the driving impressions how does this truck drive so i put about 40 or 50 000 miles on this truck and my dad has put the other 40 000 miles on it some of the things you're going to notice when you drive this truck is the engine industry smooth but it's not as refined as modern day competitions what i mean it has more nvh which is noise vibration and harshness now a lot of you older school guys or truck guys are going to say i don't give a darn who cares about that and you know what you're right it doesn't really matter that much it's a little bit rougher it's a little bit louder but it works great and it never breaks so what more could you really ask the truck accelerates pretty long not going to keep up with you know the twin turbo ecoboost that i have in my f-150 there's just no way but it accelerates pretty well that's partly to do with the 4.3 rear end which gives it a pretty nice start off the line i'll put up the power figures here so you've got you know over the run of this generation tundra from 2007 on they had three different engines you can get v6 which i think they've now phased out with the power figures of that here they had a smaller v8 which i think started with a 4.7 and then they introduced a 4.6 i'll put the fire power figures for those here and then but most people on a tundra i would say are going to have the 5.7 liter i4 speed a couple things i want to touch on the steering so the steering in this truck seems kind of weird to be talking about that i mean this is not a miata review or corvette review but you will notice that the steering is really really artificially light and doesn't have any feel or communication to it at all now i actually some of you may not notice that because you just don't notice those types of things but i do pay attention and i don't like the way the steering on this truck feels how does the transmission behave so i've done a lot of driving a lot of towing with a six-speed transmission the transmission in this truck is actually not made by toyota it's actually made by asian i don't know if i'm saying that right i think toyota chose it because they knew it was going to be a really durable long-lasting transmission and that's proven to be true because how many tundra scale transmissions have you seen not many the transmission shifts okay it's not rapid fire shifts it's not as as crisp as some of the modern trucks but it shifts fine some people have said in the magazines out there that it's kind of negligent to sort of downshift when you wanted to um it's not terrible i think it's just mediocre in that regard it's fine i think the main thing you want to know about the transmission is that it's going to be reliable and it's going to tow well and i think it does both of those things really well in this truck so what are some of my complaints about this truck from a driving perspective but also from an ownership perspective there's not many things that i dislike to be honest with you one big thing that does stand out is the fuel economy now granted fuel economy on a full-size truck or full-size suv with a big engine is never going to be excellent but this has really fallen behind the competition over the years i'll put up the epa rating here but i think it's something like 13 17 on the four wheel drive truck which is which is pretty pretty bad now you might be thinking to yourself well okay if i get 15 or 16 miles a gallon is that really much worse than 19 or 20 or 21 on a f-150 ecoboost especially if you get like the 2.7 well actually it is because the smaller the number and the miles per gallon the bigger percentage difference you're dealing with so let me give you an example of that if you go from let's say you go from nine miles a gallon to ten miles a gallon that's only a one mpg difference but it's a ten percent difference in fuel economy now let's say you go from uh 49 miles a gallon to 50 miles a gallon right on something like a prius well that's still one mile a gallon but it's only a two percent difference in economy so when you're dealing with something with low fuel economy to begin with three or four points on that scale is actually a really big deal and will really change your fuel cost in the long run i mentioned in the driving experience that this truck is a little bit louder a little bit more unrefined the ride is not that great it's just okay it's not as good as some of the modern trucks especially not the ram the whole the entire truck is dated that's not really a complaint against the truck it's just the fact that they haven't updated it really seriously since 2007. the interior quality the interior sort of build quality and refinement and and lack of luxury is is getting a little bit out of date but you know what for a lot of you you're not going to care about that and in fact that might be a good thing for many of you out there a couple things that i do have in my notes here this was addressed later on in the tundra's run but the fuel tank size so this particular truck back then you could only get the 26 gallon tank now if you've done any towing with a big full-size truck with a v8 and you've had like a small gas tank like that you know that your range is you're going to be getting gas every 200 miles or even less than that it wasn't until like i don't know 2015 or 16 somewhere in there where they give you the option of a 38 gallon tank my opinion would be if you're looking at a pre-owned tundra that's one of the biggest things you should look at especially if you're going to be towing a trailer is get a later one and get that 38 gallon tank you're really going to think yourself especially if you tow and haul things another complaint i do have is the nannies what i mean is the electronic nannies on this truck now yes all modern vehicles have safety features traction control abs blah blah blah things like that but what my complaint on this truck is they're kind of confusing and they're kind of hard to turn off my dad in particular he's not the most tech savvy person sorry dad if you're watching this but he's had a hard time figuring out what buttons to push and what sequence and holding down to turn off the traction control and then at four-wheel drive it has all these weird things like v-track and automatic lsd not that lsd that you might be thinking of but limited slip differential and so it gets really really confusing with that kind of stuff and can be hard to turn off another big dislike that i have with the tundra and i don't understand this really is that you cannot get a locking differential in the back now toyota will tell you that oh it's the electronic locker and it uses brakes to give you traction don't believe that i mean yes there is some electronic trigger going on with it tries to break the other wheel when it spins but in my experience it really doesn't work having had this truck and then having a sierra and having an f-150 with an actual locking rate differential huge huge difference on the traction in the back i'm using the real locker versus the sort of the electronic nanny that this thing has so i wish toyota would have offered especially in the trd off-road of the trd pro an actual locking rear diff it's a really strange omission on toyota's part final thoughts on the toyota tundra my dad has great pride of ownership in his truck and i think he's going to keep it for a very long time and i think that's who the toyota tundra is for if you're a truck buyer who prioritizes longevity durability and just basic functionality and also something with really good resale value as well if you do decide to sell it the tundra is an excellent choice however if you're a truck buyer who wants all the latest gadgets the best possible fuel economy and is willing to sacrifice some of the reliability that might come along with all that technology then you're better served by looking at the ram the sierra and silverado and also the f-150 the tundra continues toyota's legacy of extreme reliability durability and functionality if you're looking at a new tundra there's some things to be aware of they've improved the standard safety features on the truck i really applaud toyota for including things like adaptive cruise control automatic high beams emergency braking and other features like that that i think are genuinely useful and improve the safety for you and your family in terms of looking at the different trim levels if i was buying a tundra today in 2020 i would get the trd off-road you might be impressed by looking at the trd pro but honestly you're just getting a little bit longer suspension travel and some different wheels and tires if you want to build an off-road tundra i think starting with a trd off-road and then building it up with the parts of your choice probably will be your best bet if you're more of a luxury buyer and you want the tundra they do have the limited they have the platinum and of course they have that 1794 edition as well so ultimately if you're willing to sacrifice some fuel economy and some of the refinement that the other competitors have nowadays you'll be really well served by the tundra and you just can't go wrong with this truck i hope this review was useful for all of you out there thank you so much for your support and continuing to watch the channel please subscribe if you haven't already give the video a thumbs up that really helps me out and ride safe drive safe we'll see you out there [Music] you

Channel: Big Rock Moto

Views: 440,800

Keywords: toyota, trd, toyota tundra, tundra trd, full size truck, pickup truck, best 2020 pickup truck, tundra long term, toyota reliability, toyota 5.7 engine, ford f150, gmc sierra, chevrolet silverado, ram 1500, ram vs ford vs chevy vs toyota, tundra vs ram, tundra vs f150, tundra vs silverado, tundra comparison, best half ton truck

Id: xkKjd_rnEJo

Length: 24min 8sec (1448 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 08 2020