Will Toyota look back or forward as Land Cruiser returns?

It didn't take long for Toyota to go from "might" to "will" in resurrecting the revered Land Cruiser nameplate in the U.S. after a very brief hiatus.

"Did you really think we'd be gone for long?" Toyota said in a video posted to Facebook on Tuesday that replayed Land Cruiser badges of yore. "The legend returns."

The Land Cruiser was the one Toyota nameplate that survived the company's stumbling entry in the U.S. market in 1958 and remained in the lineup until 2021.

Toyota is giving no additional details, but company sources say the next Land Cruiser will be based on the next-generation Land Cruiser Prado, a smaller, less expensive SUV sold in overseas markets, including Europe, and marketed in the U.S. as the Lexus GX. The body-on-frame GX is overhauled top to bottom for 2024 and appears more boxy, though still upright. The next-generation Land Cruiser could reappear in Toyota's U.S. lineup as early as next year.

In designing a return of the Land Cruiser to the U.S., Toyota had choices to make to better fit the venerable off-roader into the U.S. lineup than the previous iteration, which pushed up too close to Lexus territory from a pricing perspective. But the design remains under wraps, leaving us to speculate whether Toyota might return the Land Cruiser nameplate to the segment it helped pioneer: that of a true, go-anywhere, four-wheel-drive off-road SUV to take on the Ford Bronco, Jeep Wrangler and Land Rover Defender 90. Will it offer a hybrid to keep Chairman Akio Toyoda's pledge to electrify the company's lineup, perhaps borrowing the i-Force Max hybrid powertrain of the redesigned Tundra and Tacoma pickups, aimed at increased power instead of just better fuel economy? One thing we do know is that it won't be an electric vehicle to compete with the revamped Scout coming from Volkswagen.

In terms of styling, there's a lot for Toyota's body-on-frame truck team to draw inspiration from: the FJ40 of the 1960s, which featured an available soft top and a Jeep-like design, the two-tone, wagonlike models of the 1970s and early 1980s or the mammoth luxo-barge Range Rover impostors of the 2000s.

Today, the smaller, more off-road capable Land Cruisers are the hottest models of the series among classic SUV fans, which may have helped make the business case for the Land Cruiser's return.
There's no definitive word yet on timing or whether the venerable nameplate will continue to be imported from Japan, as previous versions had been historically. All Toyota is saying for now: Stay tuned.