Is the New 2024 Toyota Land Cruiser a Thinly Diguised '90s Mitsubishi?

“The iconic Land Cruiser is back!” So said just about every advertisement, automotive outlet, Instagram post, and TV commercial last month after the new 2024 Toyota Land Cruiser was unveiled last month in Salt Lake City. Fallacy be told, the Land Cruiser’s demise had always been greatly exaggerated, since Toyota in 2021 simply decided to stop selling the SUV here in America.

Meanwhile, all the awesome FJ70 and J300 Land Cruisers still built for the rest of the world helped to build buzz here in the U.S. once Toyota’s teasers (and “leaks”) started hitting the web. All of that pent-up anticipation was, in turn, met with big-time confusion once the final form did, in fact, debut—and for good reason.

At first glance, the new J250 LC looks odd in photos—plasticine, in an overly plasticky era just begging for metal-bodied SUVs to return. The situation only gets weirder with a closer look at the spec sheet, starting with ground clearance. The revived Land Cruiser has the same clearance—8.7 inches—as a 2023 Subaru Crosstrek, the eternal butt of off-roading jokes. It's actually less than the just released Crosstrek Wilderness, which has been upped to a competent 9.3 inches. Seriously, Toyota?

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But the most important stat that matters for the J250 is a massive price drop, from nearly $90,000 for the last Land Cruiser sold in the U.S. to a starting sticker around $55,000 for the new version. Still, this seems a lot like Toyota just wants to capitalize on consumer nostalgia by getting in on the “Toyota tax” that’s inflated prices on FJ40, 60, and 80 Series trucks for about a decade now. The internal code J250 reveals exactly what’s going on here: The new Land Cruiser isn’t a Land Cruiser at all—it’s a Prado.

On the upside, I can report that the design looks much better in person, with tall and narrow proportions much more in line with classic 1990s SUVs. And that hybrid turbo-four engine will undoubtedly deliver beefy torque and solid fuel economy for urban owners. Still, the best part about the new Land Cruiser is that it opens the door for Mitsubishi’s return to greatness—if such a thing might ever truly happen again.

Up Close and Personal with the New Land Cruiser

When Toyota reps rolled out the new LC amid smoke effects and bumping music to help set the scene, an audible sigh of relief passed out of the crowd gathered to witness the grand unveil. Somewhere between a Land Rover Defender—the veritable king of plastic replacing steel in a modern SUV—and the futuristic angularity out of Kia and Hyundai today, the J250 stands taller, narrower, and critically, just smaller overall than the official imagery reflects.

Retrofuturism is so in right now, but boxy forms with bulbous fender flare transitions can often look overly cheap. Not so for the Land Cruiser up close and personal, as the proportions clearly reflect a return to the aesthetic of 1990s SUVs, including the Mitsubishi Montero (or Pajero/Shogun in other markets), the Isuzu Trooper (or Acura SLX), a Land Rover Defender, and maybe even the first three generations of 4Runners.

A few details try to kill the vibe, though, from the front bumper overhang to a massive plastic hood cowl and the rear tow hitch receiver cover. The front and rear bumper also contribute to approach and departure angles worse than the current 4Runner. Admittedly, the Subaru Crosstrek’s independent rear suspension allows for better ground clearance stats on paper compared to a pumpkin rear differential in a solid rear axle, but the two touring tire options that Toyota showed on the J250 are an unequivocal joke.

Has anyone heard of Michelin LTX Trail or Dunlop Grandtrek tires? Are they just throwaways for fuel economy compliance that customers will ditch immediately in favor of at least all-terrains? Definitely. Still, it's another strange decision from Toyota, akin almost to the 2024 Tacoma’s massive front air dams (which company reps removed surreptitiously overnight at Overland Expo earlier this summer). To my eye, 35-inch tires might just fit under the sloping bumpers, though a small lift using components shared with Tacoma, Prado, and Tundra might be necessary.

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The sole hybrid engine makes for something of a bummer, too, despite pumping out respectable 326 horsepower and 465 lb-ft of torque. Added complexity of battery cells and wiring never sounds appealing out on the trail, plus fording depths get scary quite quickly.

An eight-speed automatic only should help fuel economy and low-end grunt, if the powertrain programming approaches anything similar to the Lexus RX500h at 27 combined MPG. Don’t ask why Toyota decided not to use a true transfer case with two-wheel drive to further improve the hybrid powerplant’s expected fuel economy. At least a locking rear diff comes standard, but a disconnecting front sway bar is only available on higher trims without the awesome cloth seat upholstery.

The rest of the engineering is almost hilarious, especially because Toyota has spent the last few years introducing so-called upgrades that are really just details that the Montero featured way back in the early 1990s: bouncy suspension seats on the Tacoma, electronically adjustable suspension across the lineup, and a five-link rear end to introduce coil springs on the Tundra. All of this can be found, no joke, on a bone-stock 1992 Mitsubishi.

Don’t Forget the 4Runner

As the Land Cruiser drops down to the mid-$50,000 range, the current 4Runner TRD Pro’s starting sticker at $52,950 sure seems odd. Rampant postulation seems to suggest that Toyota can only drop the 4Runner lower in pricing, emphasizing cheaper construction and third-world features (along with third-world reliability, hopefully). The latest news from Toyota finds the 2024 4Runner staying the static. The only bone they threw is a single, new—and more expensive—orange-brown color to tide diehards over while holding on for the long-delayed redesign.

If the Land Cruiser never fully develops the vestigial third row of seats that the debut vehicles included in the trunk, then 4Runner’s position in the lineup might become all the more precarious. That third row always helped to set Land Cruiser apart from the Montero, which came with comical jump seats back in the day but still offers a nice, tall roof for anyone hoping to build a sleeping platform as a counter to the current overlanding rooftop tent and awning trends.

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Third-row cupholders and seatbelt brackets spied in SLC bring up another obvious comparison within Toyota’s cluster of a model lineup: the Lexus GX unveiled earlier this year with an even boxier exterior, a more luxurious interior, and a twin-turbo V6 engine. The GX will start at around $60,000 or maybe $65,000 for the eventual hybrid—right around the price point that should attract exactly the kind of city slickers as a base LC with touring tires and a few options.

Maybe Toyota should ditch the 4Runner outright, slotting Land Cruiser into the picture as a replacement until the increasingly inevitable transition to full electrification makes off-roading an activity only for relics and dinosaurs—like the occasional 80 Series still running on oil changes every 30,000 miles or so. Whether the 4Runner even can move downmarket, alongside a poverty-spec Tacoma, remains a serious question. If not, then a gas-only Land Cruiser sounds increasingly unlikely, as well.

Somebody, Anybody, Please Defibrillate Mitsubishi

Speculation only takes us so far, but everyone I spoke with at the LC debut brought up 1990s SUVs. The simple cloth interior of the LC’s entry-level heritage variant, the 1958 Edition, undoubtedly reinforced the reminiscing originally prompted by that exterior aesthetic. Maybe somebody at Mitsubishi noticed the same thing and took notes.

But there’s a solid chance that nobody cool still works at Mitsubishi—outside the air conditioning department, anyway. Yes, the diamond star motors will return to rally racing later this year with a built Triton pickup truck (a descendent of the Pajero/Montero’s shared L200 chassis, as if the J200/J250/J300 nomenclature wasn’t enough). But when the world wants to see more of the Delica D:5 support van after a race truck debuts, the time to re-evaluate a brand seems unavoidable.

The world wants that off-roady Delica. But here’s the thing: The Delica was just a van version of the Montero/Pajero/Shogun. Instead of a race truck that might go back to Dakar one day, why not release a new Pajero Evolution to revive Ralliart in the kind of fashion that a trim package on the Outlander plug-in hybrid simply cannot?

Global production of the fourth-generation Pajero ended alongside the American Land Cruiser in 2021, a decade and a half after Mitsu stopped selling the third-gen Montero here. Now equally popular among off-roading enthusiasts and Hollywood prop designers looking for easily identifiable terrorist-spec SUVs, the Montero deserves a chance to once again teach Toyota a lesson. Take a look at a late 1980s or early 1990s Prado or Land Cruiser, each of which stole so much of the Mitsubishi look that period advertising made a mockery of the situation.

Nobody wants a boxy Outlander PHEV, though. The new Montero/Pajero could corner the market on a simple, rugged, narrow, comfortable SUV, since serious competition from the Ineos Grenadier seems unlikely to emerge with verve anytime soon, given price point and production problems expected from any first-time automaker. The Wrangler, meanwhile, makes daily driving miserable—that tiny cabin compounding concerns about an auto stop-start battery problem shared with the Gladiator (itself with a tiny, borderline useless bed).

For the rest of the world, the J250 will receive Prado badges and sell alongside the full-sized J300 and the even boxier FJ70. Which means that in America, RoW-jealous overlanders would just go into a frenetic tizzy about a modern Montero. After all, everyone knows rooftop tents are silly, the solution to a problem created by slantback coupe SUVs without enough room or proper folding seats to sleep inside.

As I learned off-roading a Lexus recently, the whole camping trailer situation adds more complexity and concern than it’s worth. Plus, despite the LX 600’s serious capability for such a luxury vehicle, pricing well into the realm of six figures makes such shenanigans entirely unrealistic for most buyers.

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Sleep in the back, put a full-sized spare on the tailgate, and simply bring back the kind of car camping that the original SUV era made possible. With constantly improving aftermarket support for older rigs, some of which can truly rival modern vehicles in terms of reliability versus overly computerized modular construction, the prospect of buying a four-figure SUV and playing with goodies can easily sound better than buying or leasing something brand spankin’ new above fifty grand.

Plenty of Toyota fans who appreciate that legendary reliability still buy new straight from dealers, though, hoping to tack on accessories and build the truck of their dreams with perfect ownership from day one. For those with the time and money, the new Land Cruiser might just do the trick—but for anyone who wants to truly get off the beaten path, please join the rest of us and plead with Toyota to build a barebones, non-hybrid turbo-four with a manual transmission—or even that eight-speed, really.

With some beefier tires, more realistic bumpers, and a set of serious skid plates, that simple interior and 1990s exterior might just fit perfectly into the whole package. Then, Toyota would have built the Land Cruiser we all wanted, which as it turns out was just a modern Mitsubishi Montero the whole time.