Impressions After 6000 Miles

[ultane]

I was at a range of 4 miles when down to just 2 gallons left. What was your range when you parked next to the pump? Did range just go to 0 or read “empty”?

I kept driving after it said ‘0’, knowing that it was a 17.9 gallon tank, and from other folks on here, I figured that I had a significant reserve. I wanted as much of the E10 out of the tank as possible, as E0 was going back in to the fuel tank. I’m at ~1555 miles on the odometer now, and won’t need the E0 fuel after I get moved out of Florida permanently in a few weeks, since Miss Daisy stays parked in NC in my absence.

 

[mailtoarunz]

on the dashcam, the SD card is slid into the removable card holder. It's not glued; you can slide it to separate it from the holder.

You can use a 128 GB SanDisk card ($12 in amazon), which I did. It needs to be formatted as FAT32 to be recognized by the dashcam, which you have to do yourself. By default, cards larger than 32 GB will be in exFAT format.

The funny thing is, you can also use a 256 GB card, but the dashcam will only use 128 GB of that.

 

[mailtoarunz]

on the dashcam, the SD card is slid into the removable card holder. It's not glued; you can slide it to separate it from the holder.

You can use a 128 GB SanDisk card ($12 in amazon), which I did. It needs to be formatted as FAT32 to be recognized by the dashcam, which you have to do yourself. By default, cards larger than 32 GB will be in exFAT format.

The funny thing is, you can also use a 256 GB card, but the dashcam will only use 128 GB of that.

 

[laughnpup]

Have to really stretch down low to see the color indicator on the fog light button just to the left of the steering column. Toyota may need some human factors engineers.

Yes, true, and I had to read the manual to realize that the fog lights -- and thus the fog light button -- automatically turn off when the automatic head lights turn on high beam mode. Took me by surprise the first time I noticed it.

Speaking of the front buttons, t's also hard to see the AC power button which needs to be turned on for power inside the vehicle after the vehicle is turned on.. Since my wife uses her laptops on long trips, I have to search out that button by feel to turn it on while driving. I think I have it memorized by location now.

 

[laughnpup]

on the dashcam, the SD card is slid into the removable card holder. It's not glued; you can slide it to separate it from the holder.

You can use a 128 GB SanDisk card ($12 in amazon), which I did. It needs to be formatted as FAT32 to be recognized by the dashcam, which you have to do yourself. By default, cards larger than 32 GB will be in exFAT format.

The funny thing is, you can also use a 256 GB card, but the dashcam will only use 128 GB of that.

Yes, these cards are cheap and getting larger all the time. And there is no reason for a rigid upper limit on size for recording purposes which should be subject only to either the constraint of the file system exFAT which can handle Terabytes or the card itself. In fact, if you use a large capacity SD card, it will help it last longer since the duty cycle of writes determines how soon the card will fail!

 

[bluebullet]

Yes, true, and I had to read the manual to realize that the fog lights -- and thus the fog light button -- automatically turn off when the automatic head lights turn on high beam mode. Took me by surprise the first time I noticed it.

Speaking of the front buttons, t's also hard to see the AC power button which needs to be turned on for power inside the vehicle after the vehicle is turned on.. Since my wife uses her laptops on long trips, I have to search out that button by feel to turn it on while driving. I think I have it memorized by location now.

I knew that the high beams use automatically turn off fog lights. I use that as a gauge in the winter when I see oncoming cars with bright lights and fog lights on. No need to flash them as they are already on low beam with likely improperly adjusted headlights. They may have cleverly overridden the feature that keeps fogs on with high beams. I for one do not know how to do that and have no desire to know.

 

[jayce]

Like my wife sometimes says: “I don’t know. I don’t want to know. And I hate the one who knows…”

 

[tmhdgpth23227]

Today I got a low fuel warning at 10 miles…. It was down to 4 miles by the time I reached gas station. Filled tank but it only took 15.5 gallons… I was very surprised by that! It would mean there was still 2 gallons, right?

Same experience.

 

[Michael_Oregon]

Toyota needs a suggestion box. Big pop up warming on low fuel with sound would be a great software update. I need to have my LC looked at by the mechanics because I’m only getting 16/17 mpg. That fuel indicator is pretty small and I’m constantly getting down to 10 miles left before I notice. Not ideal for adventures.

 

[mailtoarunz]

Yes read that in the manual and agree that temp range is critical. However it makes zero sense that there’s an upper storage limit. It’s probably just the max size that Toyota sells. I can’t tell or find on the web what card Touota is reselling as they have it white labeled as a Toyota part number. The issue is the plug connected it’s attached to that slides into the DashCam

Any card works as far as its formatted as fat32. You might find it difficult to format a card as fat32 if the size is higher which is one issue. (There are ways which you can google - win11, linux/mac allows as well as some third part softwares).
Second is, on another dashcam that has similar restriction of 128, I have observed that it only use 128Gb even if I insert a 256 GB card. This is a possibility here also (Which I havent experimented yet)

 

[PACruiser]

Another alternative if you have a Windows 11 computer is to use disk manager. You can format the USB drive in Fat32 and then create a smaller partition on the USB drive

For example, if you have a 256GB drive you can make a 32GB partition. Assign it letter L:\ for Land Cruiser. Just make sure you don't put any other files or partitions on the drive until you are done. Then you can simply delete the partition and reformat in your normal file system when finished.

 

[laughnpup]

Another alternative if you have a Windows 11 computer is to use disk manager. You can format the USB drive in Fat32 and then create a smaller partition on the USB drive

For example, if you have a 256GB drive you can make a 32GB partition. Assign it letter L:\ for Land Cruiser. Just make sure you don't put any other files or partitions on the drive until you are done. Then you can simply delete the partition and reformat in your normal file system when finished.

Good insight for people with PCs.I have only Macs and haven't bought a Windows PC in a long time. The local limited storage on my MacBook Pro is precious enough not to install any virtualization.

 

[Nor Cal Cruiser]

Toyota needs a suggestion box. Big pop up warming on low fuel with sound would be a great software update. I need to have my LC looked at by the mechanics because I’m only getting 16/17 mpg. That fuel indicator is pretty small and I’m constantly getting down to 10 miles left before I notice. Not ideal for adventures.

This is a feature, not a bug.

 

[Skidaddl]

Sorry for the long post but a lot to pack into our thoughts on our new Meteor Shower Land Cruiser which we have had only since July 10.

We absolutely love our new Land Cruiser. We just got back from a 5600 mile drive across the west visiting friends and seeing places in the Dakotas, Wyoming, and Montana that we missed when we lived in Utah and Colorado a ways back. We are off-road , fire road, gravel road, and beach drivers, not rock crawlers for intro.

Edit on Sept 27, 2024:

Since this post received a lot of traction, I decided to add some comments about comfort in driving our Land Cruiser which now has over 7000+ miles:

We just got back from a 5600 mile trip and even though I did all the driving, my wife and I were both very pleased with the comfort and driving tech of the LC. We both have back problems and felt comfortable in the seats and did not need any additional lumbar pillows which we always used in our Jeep Grand Cherokee. The driving automation for adaptive cruise is excellent and the HUD heads up display is also really nice. It wasn’t until late in our trip that I realized I could adjust the location and brightness of the HUD which made it far more useful to me.

On the downside, there are some weird things about the passenger side though like the lack of a nearby volume control and the fact that it’s almost impossible to see anything on the dash.

However, the airflow seats which are also in the back seats are fantastic. We also love the front A-pillar handles to grab on to help step in the vehicle. All in all, we are going to put a lot of miles on our LC and they will be the most comfortable miles we have ever driven.

------ End Edit ----

She has an excellent driving experience, more comfortable than we expected for both passenger and driver. She never hesitated and could easily accelerate up steep mountain passes even in Eco mode. Our overall total mileage is 20.3 mpg after 6100 miles. I drive the vehicle pretty hard, and we have done a lot of highway and interstate miles, a bit of higher elevation driving during our three weeks out west often at 75-85 mph on roads in the Dakotas and Montana. We have done very little city or suburb driving so far though that will change. I had her in Normal mode for the first half of the big trip and switched to Eco mode for the second half just to see how it would drive which was fine! It is hard to say if she would have had much higher mileage if all the driving was in Eco mode.

My lone item to recommend to Toyota is that because of the small fuel tank, I would really appreciate a dash message reminder or dash alarm for less than 100 miles left in the tank. When I was covering 400+ miles in a day, it was easy to forget the fuel level and there are definitely some places out west where there’s no fuel service for 50 or more miles. And we stayed almost all on paved road.

We did not really use the cool box and would have preferred more storage space. A printed tray like we have seen on some posts here would be useful.

I connected the Toyota app when I picked up the vehicle with the help of the sales person. However, the digital key did not load properly, and I did not have time to get this addressed until I got back after our extended first big trip. To get the digital key working, we had to re-connect the phone using Bluetooth holding it next to the start button which took several tries. The digital key works pretty nicely but I do not depend on it. It’s great to know it’s there in case I forget the key or forget to bring it with me as a convenience when I need something in the car.

Even after getting the digital key connected, however, the Toyota app left me hanging in “Remote Activation Pending” mode. My local dealer rep who was relatively savvy about the app told me to call Toyota’s support number directly. Toyota answered within a minute and quickly solved the problem. Interesting, I mentioned to support that I had trouble setting up my wife’s app connectivity. The Toyota support person told me just use the same app login user credentials and do not create another log in. We have not tried this yet for driver settings, so we are wondering how we will get her profile settings customized.

On our trip out west, I spent a lot of time fooling with the dash settings and concluded, as mentioned elsewhere on the forum, that the Toyota features like map and music sources are not well integrated or even simply switchable with CarPlay. The most egregious is SiriusXM and CarPlay which we used day-in and day-out for three weeks. It takes at least 3 plinks of your fingers on some mechanism like the screen or the mode to switch to Sirius from Carplay.

We got the Toyota Integrated Dashcam which isn’t really integrated with anything from an application perspective. It surprisingly takes up a lot of windshield space. After a little bit of directly messing around the storage card, I learned you can screw the app up by deleting files directly. I had to re-format the drive to get it working again. Since the Toyota Integrated Dashcam app and the Toyota application (for iPhone) are not integrated, the key to pulling video files is to make sure the Toyota app wifi setting on iPhone is not set to auto connect. Otherwise, whenever I successfully connected to the Dashcam using the Dashcam app via wifi, within several seconds, my phone would reconnect to the Toyota system since the vehicle has to be powered on to use the Dashcam. The Dashcam app has a clunky user interface which requires selecting the video files you want and then downloading to the app. Then, you have to select the video files in a separate part of the Dashcam app to share them to your phone. I have not found a way load them to the Apple photo app directly. Ugh

One more thing - you cannot swap in a larger micro-SD card since it is directly attached to the plug device. Does Toyota wants you to buy larger cards directly from them? That’s ridiculous.

The dash cam takes up a lot of driver-side windshield which I found occasionally irritating when rounding sharp turns. Someone on IH8Mud moved his to the passenger side so that seems like an option.

Next steps are getting some new all terrain tires since we get some tricky weather here in Virginia, and we often are driving down to the mountains in south west Virginia and to North Carolina. Lots more on the back burner after that.View attachment 9673View attachment 9674View attachment 9675View attachment 9676View attachment 9677View attachment 9678

Great write up - thanks for taking the time to do it!

This is exactly how my wife and I envision using our Meteor Shower Land Cruiser, bikes on the back and all.