Cars.com's Kelsey Mays takes a look at the 2008 Toyota Land Cruiser. It competes with the Lexus LX 570 and Land Rover Range Rover Sport.
Transcript
(intense guitar music) Hi, I'm Kelsey Mays for cars.com. Toyota makes fuel-sipping, earth-friendly cars like the Prius, the Yaris, the Corolla. This is not one of them.
This is the redesigned 2008 Land Cruiser, a $64,000 SUV that will blaze trails straight through the Amazon. Okay, you probably won't be doing that with your Land Cruiser, but with its advanced four-wheel drive system, anything does seem possible. In this video, I'm gonna take you through an overview of the cabin and how it drives. Check out our other video for seating and cargo. Behind the upright grill sits the V8 engine from the Tundra pickup. It's got 5.7 liters of displacement, it has plenty of power for poking around town all the way up to highway speeds. It gives the SUV a much more confident feeling than a Hummer H2 or a Lincoln Navigator. It also allows a maximum towing capacity of 8,500 pounds, which is more than most competitors. The standard six-speed automatic works well most of the time. It can be a little bit indecisive on the highway, kinda taking some time to pick the right gears when you need to get into the passing lane if you leave it in regular mode. You switch over the throttle control to power mode here, it seems a little bit more decisive, although you may lose a little bit in fuel efficiency. What's nice and surprising is how little body roll there is. If you do a quick lane change, you will notice there's some tipsiness, but there's not that feeling of top-heavy roll when you're going through a prolonged corner like on a freeway cloverleaf. The high-tech suspension actually keeps the car pretty stable. Get going back in a straight line, the ride's pretty well composed. This is a body-on-frame truck, of course, so if you get going over some bumps, you will notice a little bit of suspension rebound. From the driver's seat, interior quality is kind of hit-and-miss. To be fair, you do get a lot of standard features, heated front seats, four-zone climate control, a sunroof, leather. And there does seem to be a cohesive theme of decent quality, but it's not a slam dunk. And for the amount of money you're paying, it really should be. The leather is actually something of a disappointment. It's pretty basic. It doesn't feel much better than the stuff you'd get in, maybe, say a Toyota Highlander. The Lexus LX 570 is based on the Land Cruiser and its leather feels substantially higher in quality. The same goes for the center controls. Most of the buttons have a nice evenly-damped quality when you press them down, but not all of them do. Case in point, the hazards button right here in the center, you press it down, it feels like it came out of a $15,000 car. Okay, so those were the misses. There are some hits, many actually. Panels along the upper and lower dash feel nice and soft to the touch. Nifty convenience features include dual sun visors. One comes out like so, there's another one up here. One of the better-looking navigation systems on the market and even a cool box right here. It replaces the center console. You can either throw stuff in, or if you need, you can fit a couple cans of soda or even a large water bottle in there. So what does all this money for an SUV really get you? Well, not quite the cabin quality of the Cadillac Escalade or Mercedes-Benz GL-Class. Instead, what the Land Cruiser does offer are substantial off-roading skills, a strong engine, and believe it or not, slightly better gas mileage than either one of those. Of course, that's like saying Creed is a better band than Nickelback, because 13 miles per gallon in the city is not good in any case. So if you don't need this sort of serious off-roading power, there are more fuel-efficient choices in the crossover segment. And many of them cost a lot less. <v Narrator>For additional information on this car or any other, go to cars.com and our blog, KickingTires.
