1990 Toyota 4Runner Driven: Finally a Four-Door

Car and Driver

3 hours ago

From the August 1989 issue of Car and Driver.
Since the dusty dawn of modern off­-roading, most mini-trucks with enclosed rear passenger quarters made do with two doors. That's changing faster than the weathered face of the still-wild West. Consider Toyota's 4Runners. Tall and tough trucklets from the rogues' gallery of 4Runners have glowered on the want­ed lists of sport-utility buyers for years. Now Toyota has fattened its hand with a rework of the whole 4Runner lot—in­cluding the handy option of hanging an extra pair of doors on each truck.
The new range includes two-door, four-wheel-drive models that are strong­ly reminiscent of the early tough-guy 4Runners, plus thoroughly civilized four-doors fitted with a choice of two- or four-wheel drive.
Each chassis layout includes two en­gine choices: a four-cylinder or a V-6. The rear-drive models offer only a four-­speed automatic transmission, but those propelled by four wheels can be paired with either the automatic or a five-speed manual gearbox. Toyota also offers a shift-on-the-move system that lets you snick into four-wheel drive at speeds up to 50 mph. Called 4WDemand, it's stan­dard with the V-6 and optional with the four-cylinder.
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Larry Griffin
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Car and Driver
Elbow past the extra doors, the added civility, and the familiar looks and logos and you see that the new breed was bred to be "bad" from the knobbies up. Yet Toyota's priority was to make the 4Run­ner all-around better by making it all-of­-a-piece. That meant doing away with yes­teryear's detachable fiberglass top. The 4Runner made its reputation for tough­ness as a pickup saddled with make-do weather protection—something like an early Conestoga wagon, albeit far more hospitable. It worked: for the past three years, Toyota's saddle-soaping of details put the 4Runner atop the sport-utility ranks in the JD. Power & Associates' Compact Truck Customer Satisfaction Index. Still, the factory wants the 4Runner to show schoolmarm manners with­out giving up old-hand toughness. So rather than tacking on a fibrous shell, Toyota builds a steel roof integral with the new and stronger unit body. Now it's all tight.
Depending upon how you buy op­tions, you can brew up fixings from milquetoast mild to mountain-man wild. The trucks' stance, sheetmetal, and exte­rior trim leave no doubt that Toyota wants its 4Runners to rise from the land­scape with a meaty presence. Their curb weights, which range from about 3600 to 4150 pounds, live up to their looks.
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Larry Griffin
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Car and Driver
Taking a seat in many two-door mini­-trucks calls first for clambering up to cab height—a tallish task due to most mini­-trucks' lofty pretensions of being barely minimized maxi-trucks. Then the tight packaging pinches access to the back seat, even for flexible youths. Two doors are fine as far as they go, suggesting a certain spartan sportiness, but older and stiffer folks can scissor into the back only through torso-twisting contortions.
Thanks to the more modern four-door mini-trucks, including the new 4Runner, passengers' transitory aches and pains go the way of Conestogas on the Santa Fe Trail: into oblivion. Consider main­stream sport-utility wagons that take on five-door convenience through four doors and a tailgate: the Isuzu Trooper II, the Jeep Cherokee/Wagoneer, and the Mitsubishi Montero. (Toyota's Land Cruiser, heftier and costlier than the 4Runner, has hauled the sport-utility faithful since about the time Moses said he didn't want to get his sandals wet. Age works against the Land Cruiser, though, when you idle it up beside products of fresher thinking.)
The new 4Runners embody talents ex­tracted from the mountain goat, the Conestoga, and the touring car. Meant to traverse the badlands, they also ditty-bop through the good life. You feel the new­found structural solidity and a blissful in­fusion of mechanical smoothness. The isolation from NVH (noise, vibration, and harshness) often makes the 4Run­ners feel eerily removed from the action of the moment.
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Larry Griffin
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Car and Driver
We sampled a gaggle of 4Runners in the deserts, forests, and mountains of northern New Mexico. The Toyotas had to brave power-sapping altitudes, mak­ing us wish for instant turbo kits, but re­vealed a glimpse of their repertoire through the 4wd paradise between Santa Fe and Taos.
The 4Runners' interiors come across as handsome as the exteriors, which you could classify as strong, silent types. The designs and materials applied to Toyota's truck interiors rank alongside those fitted into its best cars. That puts them near the top for concept, comfort, fit, and finish. From basic seating to complex sound systems, the top-notch mate­rials, logical design, and righteous execu­tion seem to come through.
Those parts we can be pretty sure of. We'll reserve judgment on the suspen­sions, brakes, and powertrains.
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Larry Griffin
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Car and Driver
Each 4Runner's chunky nose sits up on control arms, torsion bars, gas shocks, and an anti-roll bar. The rear holds up its end with a rigid axle, four trailing links, coil springs, gas shocks, and an anti-roll bar. The power-assisted steering turns via a recirculating ball (and slowly, at 5.2 turns lock-to-lock, which helps cushion off-road nastiness). The burly brake system bulges with vented discs up front and drums in the rear.
We focused on the upmarket 4Runner we'd be most attracted to, the 4WD SR5 V-6 with the five-speed stick. Toyota out­fitted it with optional 7.0-by-15-inch al­loy wheels and matching 31x10.50R-15 M+S tires, plus a standard 10.2 inches of rock-avoiding ground clearance. The sweet manual gearbox helps sustain zip that would otherwise be lost to the elas­ticity of the even-smoother automatic.
In the high country especially, the 150-hp 3.0-liter V-6 pulls its load much more easily than the 116-hp 2.4-liter four. Though unrelated, both engines are electronically fuel injected and fitted with a belt-driven single-overhead-cam lay­out. The four-cylinder offsets some of its horsepower disadvantage by making its peak torque at 2800 rpm, a useful 600 revs lower than the V-6's max-grunt point. Both engines pump valves and whirl cranks with lubricious ease. Very little crosstalk between components pen­etrates the veil of isolation that drapes the firewall and enfolds the drivetrain.
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Larry Griffin
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Car and Driver
Sport-utility vehicles now knock off more than a million sales per year. Toyota would like ten percent of this growing market by the mid-1990s, a threefold increase in its share. Because all of the vehicles we drove were proto­types, we can't predict with confidence how Toyota's new sport-utilities will do: like all strong, silent, tough guys new in town and dressed to kill, the new 4Run­ners remain unknown quantities. What we do know is that the 4Runner V-6 that caught our eye will sell for about $18,000.
That seems a reasonable sum to pay for four-star four-play.
Specifications
Specifications
Year Make Model Trim
Vehicle Type: front-engine, rear/4-wheel-drive, 5-passenger, 5-door wagon
PRICE
Base: $18,000 (est)
//Base price of vehicle as described in specs hed// Options: Option 1, $XXXX; Option 2, $XXXX
ENGINE
SOHC 12-valve V-6, iron block and aluminum heads, port fuel injection
Displacement: 181 in3, 2958 cm3
Power: 150 hp @ 4800 rpm
Torque: 180 lb-ft @ 3400 rpm
TRANSMISSION
5-speed manual
CHASSIS
Suspension, F/R: control arms/live axle
Brakes, F/R: 11.3-in vented disc/11.6-in drum
Tires: Bridgestone Desert Dueler M+S
DIMENSIONS
Wheelbase: 103.3 in
Length: 196.5 in
Width: 68.1 in
Height: 67.3 in
Curb Weight: 4050 lb
EPA FUEL ECONOMY (PROJECTED)
City/Highway: 16/18 mpg
C/D TESTING EXPLAINED