2026 Toyota LandCruiser Prado VX review

Much like its V6-powered LandCruiser 300 Series stablemate, the LandCruiser Prado is very popular with Australians. It’s big, wears a Toyota badge – along with all that entails – and there are few other cars you’d want to find yourself in where it’s dusty, floody or muddy. That’s the thinking, anyway.

Like the LandCruiser, its fans are rusted on, and any change to the formula creates the kind of ruckus a sports car manufacturer can only dream of. And change the formula Toyota did, clothing it in a genuinely stylish body shell, and giving it an interior that didn’t look like it had fallen out of the 1980s.

It also came with long overdue electrification, although it’s barely more sparky than the new HiLux with 48-volt mild-hybrid electrification to knock a few points off the fuel figures.

Does the Prado make the case for itself, being a lot more expensive than its natural rivals but also a lot cheaper than the LandCruiser?

The LandCruiser Prado VX (herein known as Prado for brevity and everyone’s sanity) can be had for $95,510 drive-away (NSW), or $88,100 before on-roads. There are just three colours to choose from on the VX – Eclipse Black, Dusty Bronze and Frosted White, the latter two for a reasonable $675 (although white for $675 is well cheeky). The only other option is chateau part-leather trim, which is available at no cost.

The VX lands in the middle of a six-variant range, the $73,200 GX at the entry level and the $100,690 Kakadu at the top. All share the same diesel engine, eight-speed transmission and you have a choice of five seats in the GXL.

If you’re nearing a hundred large to get your Prado VX on the road, you’ll want to know what’s on board. You get 20-inch alloys, 14-speaker JBL-branded sound system, a 12.3-inch media screen, 7.0-inch digital instrument cluster, satellite navigation, wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, AM/FM/DAB radio, three-zone climate control, a manually operated tailgate with separate openable glass window, and synthetic leather seats.

And breathe. 

The front seats are heated and ventilated, there’s an auto-dimming rear-view mirror, a 360-degree camera setup, the driver’s seat is eight-way power-adjustable while the passenger makes do with half the ways, powered steering column adjustment and there are six USB ports throughout.

Outside you’ll find wheel arch mouldings, auto bi-LED headlights with auto-levelling and auto high beam, along with a chunky grille bearing the Toyota logo.

The drivetrain features full-time four-wheel drive with a locking, torque-sensing centre differential, low-range gearing and the suspension is adaptive.

So yeah, you get a bit of stuff for your money, but each of its natural rivals – the Ford Everest, Isuzu MU-X – are cheaper, although none feature mild hybridisation.

The Toyota LandCruiser Prado 150 has been around for a while now, so you can find some for sale on Drive Marketplace, alongside other new and used Toyotas.

You can build and price a Prado on the Toyota website, and you can expect to wait a few months after pulling the pin unless you strike gold in the form of unsold stock.

Find your nearest Toyota dealer here to look at the Prado in the metal and take one for a test drive. We’d recommend test-driving one without the adaptive suspension if you’re looking at the VX or Kakadu so you can feel the difference.

To keep up to date on pricing, specifications, and latest offers on the Toyota Prado, click here.

Somehow the Prado 250 is longer than most of the LandCruiser 300 range by 10mm. It’s roughly the same in all directions, as it happens, and can carry the same number of people and almost the same amount of cargo. I’ve long been baffled by the step up to the 'Cruiser from the 250 given most of them never leave the city, let alone the tarmac.

There are differences, however, particularly in the third row. Whereas the 300 Series' third row folds very neatly into the floor, the Prado’s doesn’t, leaving your outriders high up in the cabin. The battery had to go somewhere and it’s there in the floor. 

However, even for someone in the region of six feet tall (183cm), it’s comfortable enough. You can sit without your knees in your face – thank the high seats for that – and you have storage trays on the top of the wheel arches as well as a USB-C port in each of the two seats, which is a bit fancy. As are the head-level air vents, which are repeated in the middle row.

Access to the rear is by the handy folding-tumbling middle row – which is split 60/40 – and so there is a nice easy way to get in from the side-step. Watch your feet when you put the middle row back in place, though, because you could easily crush toes or stuff.

The middle row doesn’t slide, which is good news for third-row passengers, less so for the second row. While there is a good amount of leg and knee room, it’s not what you might expect for a near five-metre-long car. Head room is fine, of course.

The seats themselves are very comfortable, however, and you have plenty of toys in the form of USB-C ports, a 12-volt and a third zone of climate control with vents everywhere.

The centre rear armrest folds down with a pair of cupholders and bottles will go in the door cards, although not big ones. 

In the front row, you could almost believe you’re in the 300 Series 'Cruiser. The dash is virtually identical, with everything the same place, just a bit more grey than the Sahara VX I drove the previous week.

There are lots of very chunky and tactile controls, which is excellent given the possibility you’re going to be bumping around off-road, but again, like the 300, it would be nice if there was a bit more variety in the buttons. And given this Prado VX is a bit more 'lifestyley' (the 20-inch alloys are a dead giveaway), I’d appreciate a bit more colour and design in the cabin.

The seats are great, feel good on long journeys, and the ventilation was very welcome in Sydney’s late-summer burst of equatorial weather.

Storage includes cupholders in the centre console, a deep (and cooled) centre box with armrest, but you can’t stand a bottle bigger than about 500ml in it. 

The materials are very hard-wearing without looking horrible and the fake leather is quite nice. 

Lots of charging as well, with three USB-C ports (one of them also for your phone connection if you don’t want to go wireless), a 12-volt and an HDMI port too.

The seven-seater Prado 250s have a bit of a problem owing to the placement of the battery for the mild-hybrid system. As it’s under the boot floor, the third row can’t fold flat, leaving an extra hoik to get things into the boot. It’s a long way up. The 182 litres available when the third row is in use are partly taken up with a clever solution – a removable storage box – but that’s a double-edged sword. It’s clever because it means there is a flat floor available, but again, your shopping will get vertigo on the climb.

There is some relief, however. The rear window glass can be opened separate to the tailgate, so you can open the glass, pop open the box and put some bits and pieces in there and then more on top. Or just use the box as a shelf. Not all-round ideal, but at least some thinking has gone on to make the best of the situation.

Storage numbers are very solid, with the aforementioned 182L amounting to slightly less than a Yaris. Folding the third row down gives you a 906-litre space, and with the middle row down you can almost fit the Yaris in the back (not really, but it’s big) with 1829L available. It’s a lot of space, even with the high-flying third row.

If you don’t need seven seats and want the bigger, easier boot, the five-seater versions have 954L to start and 1895L with the second row out of the way.

As with every other modern Toyota, the Prado comes with the company’s standard software that includes wireless Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. It has its moments, like a lack of home screen, just the map for the sat-nav and the DAB menu is deeply irritating, but overall it works well. It’s already managing to look a bit dated, but Toyota isn’t that worried about fashion.

The 12.3-inch display looks good and doesn’t dominate the space. The hardware behind it is responsive so you’re not impotently stabbing away to get things to happen, which is nice. Although it doesn’t turn down/off the audio you’re playing when you want to try your luck with Siri, which confuses the poor thing.

There are a lot of physical controls in the cabin, which is fantastic to see and touch. There is also a volume knob, but it’s in a weird place under the overhang of the dash making it a little tricky to get to from the driver’s seat. 

In front of the driver is an excellent digital dash, in expanded form over the GXL, where it looks a bit lost in the black hole of the instrument binnacle.

Toyota Connected Services is free for the first year, but after that it’s around $15 per month to keep the more advanced features. These are mostly features for remote monitoring and control of the car, but without payment, extra features in your satellite navigation are hobbled.

Upon release in 2024, the Prado 250 Series scored the maximum-available five stars.

It scored 85 per cent for adult occupant protection, 89 per cent for child occupant protection, 84 per cent for vulnerable road users, and 82 per cent for safety assistance systems.

Nine airbags protect occupants in a crash, and there are two ISOFIX and three top-tether anchors in the middle row. The third row has no anchor points for child or baby seats.

The Prado adds rear autonomous emergency braking (AEB) to the forward AEB capability. It may only be at parking speeds, but that’s when you most need it. In a car this big with limited vision owing to its height and smallish rear window (yes, there is a reversing camera), it’s a good win.

The adaptive cruise features corner speed reduction, which is a feature I’d cheerfully do without. It’s pretty good as a sort of set-and-forget item, but I’m rarely so disconnected from driving that I won’t make my own judgement. Having said that, on an unfamiliar road on a dark and stormy night it’s probably extremely useful and I’d be thankful for it.

The driver monitoring system was typically irritating and got cranky if you covered it even ever so briefly.

As with the LandCruiser 300, you have to visit the dealer every six months/10,000km. This isn’t amazing and effectively doubles your spend on servicing compared to rivals, as well as the time lost organising the service and getting it done.

Toyota offers capped-price serving for five years/100,000km, which means 10 services, all priced at $395 each. That means a tick under $800 per year in servicing, which is not cheap when you think about how absurdly cheap a Corolla or RAV4 is to service, at least relatively speaking.

Perhaps as a thank you for so many visits, if you keep servicing with Toyota, the company will cover your engine and driveline for a further two years.

Another upside is that insurance came out at $2380 per year based on a comparative quote for a 35-year-old male driver living in Chatswood, NSW. Insurance estimates may vary based on your location, driving history, and personal circumstances.

At around 2 per cent of the new car cost, that’s low compared to many quotes I’ve been getting, so that might come into play in the total cost of ownership calculus.

For a 2500kg-plus SUV with a fairly ho-hum amount of power on offer, the Prado does alright on fuel – but not spectacularly. The claimed fuel figure of 7.6 litres per 100 kilometres would be tough to get in the real world, but if you could make it, the 110-litre monster fuel tank would get you over 1400km.

As it is and with my figure – remembering I didn’t tow anything or carry heavy loads – you’d kiss 1200km with a steady tailwind. Expect a solid increase with a heavy load onboard.

Having spent plenty of time behind the wheel of the old Prado and very recently driven the 300, the Prado was an interesting proposition. I didn’t much like the 150 – soft and wallowy, steering that was only on nodding terms with the chassis and a cranky but dependable engine. It really wasn’t what I would call modern or much fun to drive. Sure, it was comfortable, but I never felt happy in it. 

Granted, it’s not my kind of car, but a big part of this job is evaluation – not critique. It did its intended job, but on the road, it was thereabouts rather than there. Off-road, obviously, a different story.

This new car obviously echoes a lot of the 300. With its vastly better cabin both in design and technology, the initial impression is one of modernity. The steering immediately felt better, both over its predecessor and the 300; the latter I was not expecting.

Firing up, though, I thought I was back in the old car. The 2.8 burst into life courtesy of the mild-hybrid’s mechanical setup, but boy does it vibrate and growl when it’s cold. It thunks into gear, too, which felt very old-school. This is one reason this car is substantially cheaper than the LandCruiser, as the 300’s V6 is a lot more agreeable.

Just the VX and Kakadu have adaptive damping, another indication that this car is more about day-to-day than heading off road, as are the road-biased tyres. Once you’re underway and the engine starts to quieten down, you feel how slow the Prado is with just 150kW on tap. You’ll either have to get used to leisurely progress – which the handling encourages – or expect to use a lot of fuel. The permanent all-wheel drive probably doesn’t help there either.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the Prado is its brittle ride. Anything other than a glassy road surface meant the whole thing moved around, every bump, every depression, every shift in surface material. The problem is, you don’t really get much of a trade-off in corners the way you do in even a entry-spec Defender 110. It kind of feels like all the money spent on this suspension setup was wasted and the standard double-wishbone/live rear would have you sorted.

It’s a strange own goal given a good part of this car’s extra expense over the GXL is the suspension.

Otherwise, the Prado feels absolutely rock solid inside and out, which is exactly as I would expect.

Like its bigger-engined brother, the Prado can tow 3500kg of braked trailer and 750kg unbraked. If you’re going all out at the maximum 3500kg, you need to keep in mind a few important stats.

The maximum towball download rating – assuming 10 per cent of the maximum rating – is 350kg. That reduces your available payload from 610kg on the VX to 260kg. That’s a solid drop and means loading seven folks inside will likely tip you over the legal weight limits, so choose your friends wisely.

Obviously towing is one of the selling points of the Prado, and with 500Nm it will be comfortable to a point, but the Prado is already down at 58.4kW per tonne with no passengers in it or anything attached, so be patient. 

The LandCruiser Prado is far and away better than either its Fortuner stablemate, the Pajero Sport or the MU-X. Each has its own charms, but setting aside the price differences, the Toyota would be my pick. The equivalently priced Ford Everest is a closer-run thing, however, because for the same price you’ll find yourself with the more powerful V6.

The Prado will have rock-solid resale if the past 30 years are anything to go by, and as it stands, it’s a very good machine to look at. The Prado VX is not as convincing as I’d expected, and I think that’s down to the adaptive suspension. It does have a lot of gear on board, looks good and I do like some of the spec inclusions, so it’s a tricky one.

I don’t think, on balance, it’s the pick of the range, so drop back to the GXL for a better ride or up to the Altitude if you’re more interested in off-roading chops.