The Toyota LandCruiser is a firm fixture of rural towns around the country – but if you’re after a Cruiser with the lot as your countryside tourer, the Sahara ZX is the one you’ll want.
- New engine and transmission are a big step forward
- Interior is logically laid out and incredibly plush
- Safety and tech step up without alienating traditional buyers
- Rear seat space seems tight for something so big
- Lane-keep and departure systems work against the driver
- Bring back the split tailgate – or just fit one that works
Introduction
Because they don’t come along too often, new generations of the Toyota LandCruiser garner a lot of attention.
That time between models is part of the reason, but for owners of the hallowed Cruiser, it’s super important that Toyota doesn’t miss a trick. Be it touring around Australia or checking on far-flung outblocks, there’s a good chance you’ll be covering a lot of time and distance in your LandCruiser.
If you’re looking for one with the lot, the 2022 Toyota LandCruiser Sahara ZX is the one to go for. Provided you can stomach that $138,790 plus on-road costs entry ticket.
With more models than ever before, there’s a wide range of models and prices to pick from. At the top of the heap, the GR Sport and Sahara ZX models are both new additions – splitting flagship duty.
The former comes with an off-road adventure focus, the latter is configured more towards touring comfort. In either case, you’ll forgo seven seats for five, but will get a boot perfect to load up.
Other ZX additions cover things like illuminated side steps, differently styled bumpers (with slightly less off-road clearance), hands-free operation for the new one-piece tailgate, and 20-inch alloy wheels – the biggest factory-fitted to a Cruiser in Australia.
That’s not all, with LED lighting front and rear, keyless entry and start, electric park brake, and a range of other details shared with other models in the range.
| Key details | 2022 Toyota LandCruiser Sahara ZX |
| Price (MSRP) | $138,790 plus on-road costs |
| Colour of test car | Saturn Blue |
| Options | Metallic paint – $675 |
| Price as tested | $139,465 plus on-road costs, $152,753 drive-away (Melb.) |
| Rivals | Nissan Patrol | Land Rover Discovery | Lexus LX |
Inside
While the previous 200 Series saw a range of interior updates over its lifetime, the 300 Series starts with a clean slate, and is a much more modern, and plush, place to be.
Interestingly, whereas the Sahara below it has seven seats, the Sahara ZX drops back to a five-seat layout. You’ll find the same in the high-grade GR Sport model too.
Without a third row to accommodate, there’s uninterrupted boot space, with a huge cube of space to load luggage into, or add your own drawers, fridge or other fit-out into. Toyota claims 1131L to the second-row seats, or 2052L with the second row folded.
A pair of speakers in the top-hinged tailgate are great for providing tunes in the shade if you stop for lunch while touring. On the other hand, the lack of the 200 Series’s split gate means there’s now nowhere to sit. Perch on the rear bumper and you’ll walk away with dirty trousers.
A little disappointingly, Toyota hasn’t used the removal of the third row to push the second-row seats back. The LandCruiser is a big unit, but second-row space is tighter than you might expect, knee room in particular, but width and head room are more than plentiful.
It’s easy to like Toyota’s driver-centric layout, with everything from the starter button to the drive modes and 4×4 controls tracing a single line down the left of the steering wheel to the gear selector. Makes a lot of sense when you think about it.
Less cohesive is the giant climate-control panel with easy to use buttons, but some functions are still accessed via the touchscreen. Seems a little odd.
Other not-quite-right details include a charge pad that’s a touch on the small side for plus-sized phones (my non-Max iPhone only just makes it into the borders), and a flip-down cover for USB ports that sits awkwardly in the way if you have anything plugged in.
Storage presents no issue, however. There’s a cooler box in the centre console, which past LandCruiser owners can verify is a very effective way to keep drinks and snacks cool and close at hand.
The split lid is an illusion. Rather than opening in the middle, the console box opens from both the left and right. Deep, secure cupholders, big door bins, and a roomy glovebox are also along for the ride – plus there are enough flat surfaces in the interior to mount radios or other equipment without it getting in the way.
As the flagship (or at least, sharing equal billing with the GR Sport), the Sahara ZX comes with a long list of toys that push it towards Lexus territory.
There’s a leather-lined interior, in a choice of black, red and black, or the beige seen here, illuminated side steps, heated and ventilated first- and second-row seats, a heated steering wheel with electrically adjustable column, driver’s head-up display, four-zone climate control, keyless entry and start, auto adaptive LED headlights, sunroof, and a kick-sensor powered tailgate.
On the car we tested, that last item proved problematic. Try as I might, it blithely ignored my kick inputs, and on a handful of occasions pressing the button to open or close the gate would signal the warning beep, but the tailgate would refuse to move.
| 2022 Toyota LandCruiser Sahara ZX | |
| Seats | Five |
| Boot volume | 1131L seats up / 2052L seats folded |
| Length | 5015mm |
| Width | 1980mm |
| Height | 1950mm |
| Wheelbase | 2850mm |
Infotainment and Connectivity
Taking pride of place in the broad dash is a 12.3-inch infotainment screen with crisp, clear graphics and snappy load times. While it might look a lot like other Toyota in-dash systems, this one clearly has some added processor grunt.
Wired Android Auto and Apple CarPlay are available, and the size of the screen means you can run a split display with your phone on one side and your choice of native climate, mapping or off-road info on the other.
A 14-speaker JBL audio system provides tunes from AM/FM or DAB radio, Bluetooth, and a CD/DVD player. In the back there’s a pair of 11.6-inch rear entertainment touchscreens that are also phone-mirroring capable – but no headphones anymore, they’re now a BYO requirement.
The driver also faces a pair of analogue dials with a 7.0-inch display in between, with key info projected onto a colour head-up display – all a huge leap forward over anything found in the 200 Series Sahara.
Safety and Technology
Another area that takes a large leap forward over the previous-generation car is safety, with a much longer list of included features. On the Sahara ZX this runs to autonomous emergency braking for pedestrians (day/night) and cyclists (day), and intersection turn assist.
In a strange mix-and-match of equipment, the LandCruiser from VX and up comes with lane-centring assist to keep you within lane markings. But rather than using this tech for lane-departure prevention, it uses an older ‘yaw assist’ system that grabs the brakes on one side of the car to yank you back in your lane.
Better to have than not have, certainly, but the system is easily confused in areas where multiple lines exist, or if you cross intersections with cross-markings, jabbing the brakes when you’d least like it to do so. The lane centring is also twitchy and jerky, even in its lowest setting, constantly fighting the driver and seemingly scanning the car from side-to-side within its lane.
Adaptive cruise control with full stop-and-go speed control is standard, as are front and rear surround-view cameras for parking and off-roading, 10 airbags, a pair of ISOFIX child seat mounts, rear cross-traffic alert, blind-spot monitor, and automatic high beam.
Joining other recent Toyota models, the LandCruiser also comes with Toyota Connected Services. It can also operate via an SOS button and track the location of the vehicle if it is stolen, or connect to emergency services in the event of an accident.
For now, the LandCruiser 300 Series is yet to be crash-tested and scored by the local crash-testing authority ANCAP.
| 2022 Toyota LandCruiser Sahara ZX | |
| ANCAP rating | Untested |
Value for Money
Value is a hard thing to pin down for the LandCruiser Sahara ZX. On one hand, if you want a Cruiser, there’s a solid chance little else will fit the bill, but on the other, price rises across the board move the 300 Series into a somewhat different consideration set.
More luxurious than its predecessor, and even leap-frogging the Lexus LX range, the LandCruiser is now closer to luxe SUVs like those from Range Rover, but maintains its ladder-frame construction and serious off-road capability.
As a new model in the range, the Sahara ZX, at $138,790 plus on-road costs, is roughly $7000 more than the Sahara Horizon special edition it steps in for. With more power, more tech, and more safety bundled in, that five per cent increase doesn’t seem too outlandish.
As with other members of the Toyota range, the 300 Series comes with a five-year/unlimited-kilometre warranty, plus an additional two years’ engine and driveline coverage if you service on time according to the service schedule.
Services are required at six-month/10,000km intervals. Toyota caps the first 10 visits (or five years) at $375 per service.
Toyota quotes an official fuel consumption figure of 8.9 litres per 100km, which seems fairly optimistic for a vehicle of this size and weight. Even on low-stress freeway runs, the trip computer showed low 11s, but after a mix of highway, urban and off-road use settled at 12.5L/100km. Higher than claimed, but not obscene.
| At a glance | 2022 Toyota LandCruiser Sahara ZX |
| Warranty | Five years / unlimited km |
| Service intervals | 6 months or 10,000km |
| Servicing costs | $2250 (3 years), $3750 (5 years) |
| Fuel cons. (claimed) | 8.9L/100km |
| Fuel cons. (on test) | 12.5L/100km |
| Fuel type | Diesel |
| Fuel tank size | 110L |
Driving
With a new V6 diesel under the bonnet, the 300 Series makes waves for the potential to be somehow ‘less’ than the V8 it replaces.
No such luck, however. The new 3.3-litre twin-turbo V6 is superior to the old 4.5-litre TT V8 in almost every way. It is more refined, more responsive, and boasts bigger outputs with 227kW at 4000rpm and 700Nm from 1600–2600rpm.
That’s backed by a new 10-speed automatic transmission and a full-time four-wheel-drive system. Again, a 10-speed auto causes trepidation – Ford uses an unrelated 10-speed ‘box in the Everest, and it isn’t always good. Toyota’s implementation is much, much better.
So, right from the get-go, the new drivetrain is quieter and smoother at idle. Moving off from a standstill, it has a familiar low-RPM/low-speed hesitance that I don’t consider a bad thing. It means you can move around cautiously as you need, but a bigger prod on the accelerator really gets things moving.
The soundtrack is a lot like that of the old engine but fainter. Best of all, once there’s a little speed under the wheels, if you need to fire up a freeway ramp, or dig in for some overtaking haste, the engine has a heap of torque in reserve and builds both engine and road speed quickly.
The new automatic knows intuitively the right gear for any situation, and doesn’t hunt or second-guess itself. That holds true both trundling around town or booming along an open road.
Noise insulation is impressive. It’s comfy and quiet across a variety of surfaces.
On some surfaces, the Sahara ZX rides like a cloud, but find the right (or wrong) diagonal road join or too sharp a pothole and the 300 Series feels every bit the body-on-frame car it is. The rigid rear axle doesn’t follow as faithfully as the independent front, and the body tends to judder as a result.
It’s possible to make the suspension softer still in Comfort mode, but I found this a little too roly-poly. In Normal mode it rides just fine, or for slightly sharper suspension, throttle, steering and transmission settings Sport S and Sport S+ do as they describe, but don’t feel strictly necessary in something so big and wafty.
Steering is super-light, making it a snap to twirl into parking spaces, but leaving things feeling a touch too darty at freeway speeds. On the other hand, Toyota has shortened the brake pedal stroke noticeably, and the news is only good.
It’s now much easier to bring the Cruiser to a smooth halt, and the clamping force when stopped is reassuring, unlike the 200 that always felt a little like it wanted to creep away.
While the bulk of our time was spent firmly on rural roads, we also ventured off the beaten track briefly.
Admittedly, the Sahara ZX probably isn’t the ultimate off-roader’s choice (that’s where the GR Sport steps in), but can still well and truly hold its own, even with 20-inch wheels and a ‘low clearance’ front bumper, with a 24-degree approach angle instead of the 32 degrees on the rest of the range.
Ground clearance remains at a claimed 235mm regardless of spec, and departure angle is 25 degrees across the range.
The whole range has permanent four-wheel drive, with selectable low-range and a locking centre diff. The ZX comes with a Torsen rear limited-slip differential, again only the GR Sport adds a front and rear locker, and electronically disconnecting ‘e-KDSS’ swaybar suspension.
Be that as it may, it really couldn’t be easier to hit the rough stuff in a 300 Series. Tap the drive-mode selector to open up off-road modes and twist the dial to match the terrain you’re on. For the trail we hit, low-range was barely necessary, though I did give it a run and it engages snappily enough.
The real boon comes from the surround-view cameras.
On uphill runs or steeply rutted terrain, the 300’s bonnet stands in the way like an impenetrable monolith. Being able to see in front of (and under) the nose of the car, and spot the front tyres to keep them clear of sidewall-shredding obstacles, makes positioning those 265/55R20 Bridgestone Duelers a breeze.
There’s also some peace of mind in not having air suspension, I reckon. It means the LandCruiser goes without height adjustment, but also means you won’t have to nurse it home with sagging suspension.
Adaptive damping is still on offer, though, to firm things up back on-road.
| Key details | 2022 Toyota LandCruiser Sahara ZX |
| Engine | 3.3-litre V6 turbo diesel |
| Power | 227kW @ 4000rpm |
| Torque | 700Nm @ 1600-2600rpm |
| Drive type | Full-time four-wheel drive with low-range transfer case |
| Transmission | 10-speed torque convertor automatic |
| Power to weight ratio | 86.3kW/t |
| Weight (kerb) | 2630kg |
| Tow rating | 3500kg braked, 750kg unbraked |
| Turning circle | 11.8m |
Conclusion
For something so comprehensively new, the 300 Series appears to have a couple of small details that don’t quite land. No doubt, over the course of its model run, most of those will get addressed.
As it stands right now, though, the 2022 LandCruiser Sahara ZX is already a monumental step forward over the model it replaces. Nicer to drive, stocked with additional luxury equipment, more high-tech – but in no way that poses a detriment to its traditional owner base.
Rugged adventurers are more likely to be swayed by the GR Sport, but for touring and towing, or simply covering big distances on rural roads in exquisite comfort, the plush Sahara ZX really is as good a LandCruiser as you’ll find.
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