Cars.com's Kelsey Mays takes a look at the seating and cargo features of the 2008 Toyota Land Cruiser.
Transcript
(upbeat techo music) Hi, this is Kelsey Mays for cars.com, and this is the redesigned 2008 Toyota Land Cruiser. Now, in our other video, we took you through an overview of the interior and talked about how it drives.
Here we're going to talk about seating and cargo. A Land Cruiser seats up to eight; two up front, three in the second row, and three in the third row. The front seats have the regular complement of power adjustments. Range is good, but not exceptional, so if you're much taller than six feet, I think you're probably going to be sitting with it all the way back. There are no power adjustable pedals. Some competitors offer this, but there is a standard power tilt and telescoping steering wheel. That's something that's still fairly rare in this segment. As it is, I have plenty of room. Drivers with longer legs will appreciate these sort of padded areas right here where your knees might knock against the center part of the dash. Nicer to have that than a typical hard plastic that's usually there. We're climbing into the second row now. This is where I'd have the seat to drive. I'm about six feet tall, so you can do your own math. As you can see, I have plenty of leg room and decent headroom. The seat does sit a little low to the ground, so I wish I had a little more thigh support. It does move forward and backward and recline a little bit; both nice to have. Even with it all the way forward, I'm still okay. Now, getting into the third row happens just by pulling this lever here. One fluid motion, pretty simple. You can hop in. There's plenty of room. Ya know, like most third rows, the seats back here are pretty thinly cushioned. Headroom is actually pretty good. And, leg room, if you can get your second row passengers to move forward a couple inches, would be fine. Of course, third rows are mostly for kids. With the seat this low to the ground, you're going to want to put the whiniest kids back here. You're either going to love or hate the tailgate. It opens up in two separate sections above and below. It doesn't have a power operated top section like the related Lexus LX 570 does. With this sort of setup, you have a nice low lift-over. You can kind of lift luggage over without too much trouble. Unfortunately, shorter folks will have to note that there's about an extra foot or so here that you're going to have to reach in and grab stuff. And behind the third row is about 16 cubic feet of space. That's competitive for this segment. The third row folds down, but not flat into the floor like some others do. If you want a flat load floor, it does fold up to the side, like so. Doing it really isn't all that difficult because there are springs that kind of make the seats come up on their own. Likewise, the second row folds down. If you need, it tumbles forward. There are these hooks right here that detach and reattach to the B pillar there to kind of hold the second row in place so that you do get a pretty flat load floor. Familiar problem: Now you have all these hooks in the floor where the seats used to assemble into. Toyota's solution is plastic covers. They detach from these sort of pods behind the seats. They go in there, and now you have a flat, completely obstruction free load floor. With everything in place, the maximum cargo volume is just over 80 cubic feet. That's a little bit low for this segment. All told, the cargo situation here isn't as convenient or fluidly sort of put in place as the GL-Class or the Lincoln Navigator. The Land Cruiser does compete on other levels, but if cargo and seating capacity is your only aim, you might want to check out one of its competitors. <v Announcer>For additional information on this car or any other, go to cars.com and our blog KickingTires.
