Li’l FJ
March 23, 2026
Alex KiersteinThe Land Cruiser FJ is hitting the Thai market. This IMV-based SUV’s appeal is tempered by its unavailability here.
I’ve written about Toyota’s awesome IMV-based vehicles—the Hilux Travo-e, the incredible IMV Origin concept, the Hilux Champ and its impossibly compelling RV upfit—and so, here I am again, talking about an IMV-based vehicle. Either I have a strange complex or the platform produces cool vehicles that have appeal beyond their “grass-is-greener” aspect; no IMV product is sold here. They’re all destined for some Asian markets (particularly Thailand), South America, and the Middle East. That goes for the Land Cruiser FJ, seen here in a few semi-custom guises in honor of the launch of the model in Thailand, too.
Toyota didn’t conceive of these as having North American market appeal, and it didn’t bake in the engineering needed to federalize them, so turning these specialized (and bare-bones) vehicles into something that would sell here is a substantial undertaking. But I can’t help but think that the Toyota Land Cruiser FJ-like vehicle would be a much better fit for our market than the terminally uninteresting Corolla Cross, which makes the RAV4 seem extremely compelling by comparison.
It might look like a unibody crossover, but this is actually a ladder-frame, truck-based SUV. It’s slightly longer than a Corolla Cross on a wheelbase that’s several inches shorter, powered by a 2.7-liter gas engine that we got in the last-generation Tacoma. It’s analogous to the FJ Cruiser in some respects. That retro 4×4 is now very much a cult classic and sought after by off-roaders and overlanders as the shortest-wheelbase variant of a family of highly capable SUVs.
To celebrate its launch in Thailand, Toyota cooked up a few concepts highlighting what this IMV-platform vehicle could become. Toyota Thailand has done this with previous IMV vehicles, and there’s a compelling combination of creativity and the underlying vehicle’s charismatic styling that has a lot of appeal to me and other American auto observers. None of them are groundbreaking—there’s an overlanding-style build with a roof-top tent, a street cruiser style model, et cetera—but they each show off the versatility of the Land Cruiser FJ as a base for modification.
I’ll say this: I’d love a sub-Wrangler-sized, body-on-frame 4×4 in our market, the Suzuki Jimny being the best case scenario. I’m not sure that, even in an era in which it appears that regulatory standards for cars and trucks are heading towards a laissez faire situation, it would make sense to directly adapt the Land Cruiser FJ for our market. But plug a unibody, hybrid FJ-like vehicle into the mix and one of two things would happen, I suspect.
It could nicely supplement the Corolla Cross, appealing to a Subaru Crosstrek-type audience, and giving Toyota a lifestyle vehicle below the $40k-plus RAV4 Woodland. (Seems like a pretty large, outdoorsy crossover shaped hole in the lineup to me.)
Or, like the situation with the Ford Bronco Sport and the Escape, it could be a fratricide. An FJ triumph over the blobular nonentity that is the Corolla Cross.
Either way, given the vehicle affordability situation, the oil price shock that is upon us, and the competitive landscape, I think I know what I’d be proposing were I a product planner in Plano.
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