Toyota Land Cruiser

Expert Rating:

What is it?

There are those, believe it or not, who find themselves daily at the bottom of a ruddy great greasy mud hill, staring upwards and pondering how on earth (literally) they're going to reach the summit. Here's Toyota's earth-conquering answer: the fourth-generation Land Cruiser.

Make no mistake; this is a serious off roader. But with a starting price of £30k, rising to around £45k, it also needs to provide a bit of on-road comfort and prestige. After all, the latest Land Rover Discovery 4 is one of the best all-rounders money can buy, full stop. Can the Toyota deliver?

Is it any good?

Whether the Land Cruiser is any good or not depends on what you're after, because, unlike the Disco 4, on regular roads the Toyota's mud-plugging remit is blindingly obvious. Where the Land Rover is composed and mercifully free of body roll on the tarmac, the Land Cruiser betrays its penchant for horrible terrain by being a slightly roly-poly thing. And while light steering and very strong brakes make it feel smaller and more fleet-footed than it actually is, the car can also exude the distinct impression that the body is detached from the wheels. As it happens it is, essentially, because the body-on-frame structure of the previous generations remains, despite an all-new chassis.

The 3.0-litre D-4D engine - the only choice unless you migrate to the entirely separate, bigger V8 model - has masses of pulling power, enough to make light work of hauling the weight along. That said, the 171bhp unit doesn't like to rev, so any attempt to indulge in a bit of 0-62mph testing (road rules permitting) makes it feel slow. The five-speed auto, pertinent as it is with its high and low ratio settings, is also better suited to languid driving: it's slow to kick down, but performs unobtrusively enough for most driving.

Off road, though, the Land Cruiser verges on indomitable. The range-topping spec we drove (of a three-tier range comprising LC3, LC4 and LC5) features Toyota's new Crawl Control programme as standard, which allows the driver to select from five speeds at which the car can creep across the most treacherous terrain, up or down hills, with no driver pedal input at all. It also gets a limited slip centre differential that can distribute torque across the front and rear axles according to where it's needed most. Self-levelling air suspension is also an option.

Should I call the bank manager?

Again, that depends on what you need. It might, possibly, be fractionally more adept at taking its driver by the hand and nannying him across whatever substance may be underfoot than the Discovery - but that probably won't matter to most. What will matter, rightly or wrongly, is how much this thing costs, how it drives around town and on the motorway, and whether the neighbours will be impressed. Sadly, the new Land Cruiser is lacking in a number of key areas - not bad, but not quite up to its price point.

This is not a cheap car. A £30k LC3 does get the fundamental items of equipment you'd expect for a car of that price - alloys, cruise control, climate control, Bluetooth for exampled - but not much more than that. LC4 is well specced though, adding fancier dynamic suspension, triple-zone air conditioning, bigger wheels, auto wipers and lights, navigation, a 17-speaker stereo and a third row of seats in the boot (optional in LC3). LC5 gets Crawl Control, even fancier height controlling suspension, terrain cameras with a very useful wheel angle display for serious off-roading, and a TV screen for the rear. For a big car it's not too bad on fuel though, returning 34.9mpg combined.

So it's well-equipped, roomy, quite cheap to run and brilliant off-road, but sadly it's all blighted by an interior fashioned from cheap looking plastics. Toyota has gone for a utilitarian vibe in the cabin but it hasn't quite worked; there are too many buttons and no real coherence to the way they're placed together. The driving position is good, though, and its soft setup will appeal to some in the same way some like waterbeds.

Summary

The Land Cruiser's off-roading ability, good spec level, decent economy and the likelihood of flawless reliability are all positive attributes. However, it has neither the prestige, design flair, perceived material quality nor on-road composure of the Land Rover Discovery, and for those reasons the Disco will make more sense to more people.

Mark Nichol