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.
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.
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