I've had it up to here with my Toyota. (Now close your eyes and imagine a lanky mid-thirties man with his hand held somewhere near the ceiling).
Our family finally outgrew the Tacoma we bought in 2020, a vehicle I swore to keep until the engine failed or until the sun exploded. Whichever came first. I bought the truck off the showroom floor—at a small discount and 0% APR—right when COVID uncertainty hit full swing.
But a lot has changed since May of 2020. For one, humanity has mostly normalized. Secondly, demand and inflation have detached the Toyota truck market from sanity. Third, my wife and I had our first kid.
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That last thing caused most of this unforeseen friction; My son’s new toddler seat won’t wedge into the Tacoma’s back row. I didn’t consider this back in 2020. Probably because people without kids—I was one of you, way back then—have real lives. They’re concerned with swilling novel Amaro cocktails, sexy vacations in Palm Springs, and fleshing out the mundane details of their own happiness.
How great for them.
I’m now quite busy scraping half-eaten yogurt out of the cracks between our hardwood floors, thank you. No time for happiness or fulfillment. That’s all nonsense. I digress.
The new convertible baby/toddler seat just won’t fit, at least not with my wife riding shotgun. Instead, my wife’s knees drumroll against the dashboard. She is not a tall person. Sometimes I swear the Tacoma’s designers built this truck to accommodate four Lieutenant Dans.
Okay, so Tacomas have no legroom. It’s a known complaint. So are this truck’s many other shortcomings. Namely: a lack of power and efficiency from the asthmatic V-6, a six-speed automatic that shifts two seconds late every time, primitive road manners, a profound lack of in-cabin technology, perhaps the worst stereo speakers of any car on the market, and the general sense that by paying more than forty grand for a truck that still has drum brakes out back, you got fleeced.
I bought one anyway.
Because nothing else delivers exactly what these long-serving Toyota trucks do. Namely, industry-conquering reliability, a mechanical simplicity that at-home mechanics revere, a bare-bones machismo, and effectively nothing else. We pay so much for them because they’re uncomplicated.
If these sound vaguely like the ramblings of a head trauma victim, you’re not wrong.
Naturally, after the car seat debacle, when car shopping began again, I dusted off Toyota’s portfolio of dumb old trucks, remembering fondly how my parents raised me and my brother from sprouts to saplings in the back row of a 4Runner.
So I borrowed a "new" 2024 4Runner, which was first introduced in the Year of Our Lord, 2009, at a time when Dakota Fanning seemed the next great Hollywood talent—to test fit the car seat and navigate a weekend road trip with the family.
Alas, just like Tacoma, the 4Runner is comically outdated.
Sure, the top-level TRD Pro that sat in my driveway still looks the business, resplendent in a dashing shade of brick-orange called “Terra.” The 4Runner’s squared-off haunches reward bold paint colors, with taut body lines that buck the swollen, melting-mallow chic of most modern SUVs.
But that aggro exterior is merely wrapping paper. This is a truly stone-aged truck.
The 4Runner’s dash and center screens would make a Game Boy Camera blush. That’s how little resolution they offer. Toyota’s top-down 360-degree camera, called Multi-Terrain Monitor, is nearly unusable as a result. That’s a big problem; MTM is a safety feature above all, not an off-roading feature as it's sold.
MTM offers a view below the 4Runner’s beltline when you’re crawling through a crowded parking lot, or backing out of the garage where your toddler might be riding his bike.
Nothing else delivers exactly what these long-serving Toyota trucks do.
By sticking with such primitive screens well into the 2020s, Toyota offers less safety in the 4Runner than it should, as we rely more than ever on backup cameras and 360-degree top-down views to navigate safely. The screens within my 2020 Tacoma are only slightly better, offering just enough resolution—and I do stress the just—to function passably. The 4Runner’s two screens are simply trash, seemingly ported in from your 2002 Nokia brick.
The rest of the interior follows suit. Cheap materials and outdated design abound, from the hyper-chunky shift knob that looks like it should operate a Budweiser tap, to the rough materials coating the cabin.
Do not forget this truck costs $56,445, as tested.
Fifteen years after this truck was first introduced, and with little in the way of improvement across that decade and a half, you can’t help but wonder: Who’s buying these things anymore?
Well, probably someone like me.
Most of the 4Runner’s charm is that “comically outdated” also feels a lot like “charmingly outdated.” The old truck’s climate controls are splayed across oversized, chintzy-feeling knobs that protrude from the center console like a range of cinder cone volcanoes. As with every other knob and switch in the cabin, these controls are understood by intuition alone.
Can you say that of the control palette on any modern vehicle?
There’s a pleasant weight to every interior control that old cars used to have, from the heft of the steering feel to the click-flack of the wiper stock.
You won’t get lost in a bevy of complicated infotainment menus here. There are none. The heated seats and wheel both have physical switchgear stuck awkwardly into the dashboard. One simple ka-thwick and your cheeks are a cookin’.
The 4Runner’s naturally aspirated 4.0-liter V-6 offers a punch of off-the-line torque (278 pound-feet) that most of today’s hybrid-four mills can’t touch. Of course there are requisite penalties in efficiency; Shell execs will be pleased to hear I averaged about 16 mpg.
But dang it if this engine’s growl doesn’t fill the 4Runner’s cavernous cabin with rough-and-tumble charm. You won’t find that with any modern inline-four on earth. Plus there’s that reliability thing. If you had to bet your mortgage on a car that’d last 30 years with just oil changes alone, this is it. Bar none.
The 4Runner broadcasts capability and durability and backs that image up with surpassing capability and durability. I like that.
Alas, The Centre Cannot Hold.
Toyota’s replacing every last one of these old trucks in short order. My third-generation Tacoma’s already met the undertaker. The completely new sixth-gen 4Runner is coming hot on its heels. They’re both built on the same TNGA-F platform underpinning everything from the new Tundra, Sequoia, and Land Cruiser, to the new Lexus GX.
Toyota’s body-on-frame trucks will run largely similar powertrains in short order, switching from stone-hammer reliability to a new generation that's more efficient, more complicated, well… more everything. They’ll all have nice screens on the inside.
For many of us, these changes feel threatening, as we cling to the last of these old, terrible, wonderful trucks and their compromises.
As for my own driveway? Well, I can tell you the car seat fit perfectly in the 4Runner. So did my wife’s knees. Beyond that, what more could you need?
