There’s a rather large hullabaloo on the internet about the new Toyota Land Cruiser using the same platform as the Toyota 4Runner. On the surface, it’s easy to assume Toyota is approaching the current Land Cruiser as a scaled-down version of itself or a luxury-biased 4Runner. However, we don’t like making assumptions, and we don’t believe it takes the big picture into account, including the long and varied history of the Land Cruiser and the fact that, long ago, Toyota split the Land Cruiser into three series – the heavy-duty series, the station wagon series, and the light-duty series, also known as the Prado, which is where the current version available in the US sits. The previous generation available in the US is considered part of the station wagon branch, and it also shared its platform with the Toyota Sequoia.
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