Nice to see the exterior looks like a truck again and like a Toyota and not just a Lexus with a Toyota grille. I wish the interior was a little cleaner looking… but it does have a ton of buttons!
Slight Bronco vibes in a good way! I think if the whole thing was 20% simpler it would be more iconic visually but for a modern Toyota, nice work.
a little more about it. Nice that it is actually SMALLER than the last gen! That rarely happens. 4.4" narrower and a little over an inch shorter… not much shorter, but I feel like cars have gotten so wide, a little narrowness is nice… also interesting you can order it with round or square headlights? That seems like an odd option.
Round vs Square headlight:
I know it’s not the same car, but how is it worse than this that came out in 2006? Looks like a bad Transformer toy in the front, a LEGO model in the side and forgettable in the rear.
Pretty much agree with everything @_YO says. SUVs that try to look like speedy little cars are my #1 gripe with modern car design, so I’ll take some slightly obnoxious “tough” styling over swoopy-swoops any day of the week. The design is defined by sensible, purposeful lines that run the length of the form, and that’s a win in my book.
The over-detailing is annoying but not unexpected from modern Toyota, and I agree with @rkuchinsky that the old FJ looks much better in terms of understated detailing that supports, rather than fights, the overall gesture.
With respect to the interior, what an absolute mess. It just goes to show that a blanket statement like “buttons are better than screens” only gets you so far. Cluttered, indecipherable UX/UI is bad no matter the medium, and car interior controls have always been awful. This is just another example.
Surprising how many body panels it appears to share with the new Lexus GX. I prefer the Lexus front.
It looks like the interior was fought over by 10 different designers people and no one won 
Why it has square and round lights.
I like it, but I’m not prepared to see 500 of them at every trailhead, REI, and bike shop in a 100 mile radius of me soon. Will be funny to watch the one-upsmanship of gear nuts buying the TRD Pro versions, too… will be $100K pretty quickly…
Every time I see car design sketches why do I always think “what happened?”
… It’s either the designers suck at grasping reality or are so disassociated with engineering it’s always almost inevitable it’s a disappointment.
In no other industry could you get away with cool concepts that turn out so much different (worse).
This is definitely not the worst (see any econo car that’s drawn with 22” rims in concept), but indeed much better looking in concept than reality. That’s not good design.
Sigh.
While I seem to agree - sketch:fun, photo:meh - I can’t identify where exactly production deviates from sketch? All the important details are there.
I also found that car looks much better in video, perhaps its the frog perspective that makes the front boxier than reality (and sketch).
Perhaps this is what Sasha/Hardline is doing right - auto designers should be doing their own CAD.
I think it’s just the usual differences. Less overhang. Shorter greenhouse. Huge wheels. Exaggerating perspective…
I have been saying for years that if your sketch looks demonstrably better/cooler/sexier than the final product, you’re a good artist and a shitty designer. Unfortunately, the auto industry - or at least the concept “design” side of it - doesn’t seem to care.
I disagree strongly with this sentiment. Perhaps that definition holds for smoke detectors, toilet handles, and other more pedestrian objects sketched by smaller groups of designers working in smaller industries. As I understand it, the point of automotive sketching is to inspire, suggest, enthrall, and sell. These companies have dozens of people who’s literal job is to shepherd the inspiring sketch into manufacturable surfaces.
The sketch that doesn’t look demonstrably better/cooler/sexier than the final product doesn’t get picked for production.
I 100% agree that that is the standard automotive process. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not faulting the artists for doing exactly what they’re tasked to do. I simply feel like that task is incredibly misguided if your ultimate goal is to produce the best product possible. In my opinion the automotive standard is simply a poor design process that leads to poor design solutions.
Yeah… and we on the outside only really see the sizzling sketches, not the process sketches that actually communicate info to colleagues. Its also interesting to contemplate the stylistic and expository sketches of interiors, compared to exterior styling. I think there’s more understanding and problem solving of the sort most designers do, in the interiors.
I’ve always loved the J60 series and the iconic proportions. It seems like they made engineering decisions to push the platforms’ off road capability by making it narrower and sacrificing some interior comfort. In the same vein, I selfishly wish they would have also shortened the wheelbase for better off road ability and captured a more dynamic/iconic proportion.
Design wise I like they’ve gone back towards simplicity on the exterior, just feel like the proportions let it get lost in the sea of SUV’s of today.
Image 1: Shortened wheelbase by about 4" and pushed C pillar back.
Image 2: Same as above, but lengthened rear overhang by 4" for that 80’s cool junk in the trunk look.
(not sure why I cannot embed the renderings into this post)
Sorry, I don’t buy the “it’s not a designers’ job to make sketches that are realistic” way of thinking. They are designers. Not illustrators. Knowing what’s possible AND making is sexy is the job.
Back in the day Sid Mead, Pinnafarina Studio or whomever had good sketches but they also looked pretty close to the concepts…
I’ve actually recently had several discussions with large, top tier footwear execs and design leaders about this exactly so it’s not only trans design I think. Young designers out of touch with reality and making “impossible” sketches is a problem for everyone in the product creation process.
I couldn’t find any good examples of Syd Mead sketches vs. products… everything was for SFX.
Here is the Pininfarina ex-CCO speaking on this very topic.
It is precisely in those freehand sketches that the clearest theme and the most successful proportions could be perceived, allowing one to glimpse and imagine the shape of the car one wants to design. Above all else, this is a question of lines and accelerations of the curves, as created by the strokes of the hand, but also of how the various elements are proportioned - which typically is in somewhat exaggerated a fashion in those initial sketches, in order to explicitly express the desired character… Accordingly, ensuring the continuity and permanence of the selected original theme is certainly one of the key elements of success for a design project. And it is precisely for this reason that designers are regularly asked to «go back to the initial sketch».
