Our 2025 Toyota Land Cruiser Long-Termer Makes a Great Camping Rig

People buy body-on-frame off-road SUVs for a lot of reasons, but ostensibly, it’s to take them somewhere out into the wild. Once there, it stands to reason you might want to stay the night, and our yearlong test 2025 Toyota Land Cruiser makes a great camping rig.

Not Our First Rodeo

Anyone can take any car to a drive-in campsite with paved roads, running water, and flush toilets. If you really want to rough it, you’ve gotta get out in the sticks. We did just that in another Land Cruiser specced almost identically to ours. Tires aired down, it climbed the eastern Sierra Nevada right alongside a Ford Bronco Sasquatch and Jeep Wrangler Rubicon. By the end of the trail, we voted the Toyota second in the comparison test, owing to the Ford’s superior ground clearance and off-road tech features, but it was a close second. I was very skeptical of this new, downsized Land Cruiser, and that test won me over.

The Land Cruiser’s raw ability to go farther off-road than you’d think just looking at it is a big part of its charm. This truck will get to most campsites, no matter how far out, and it’ll bring all your stuff along despite being smaller inside than the old full-size Land Cruiser.

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Handy Features

When you do load it to the ceiling with coolers and tents and whatnot, you can still see out the back thanks to the digital rearview mirror. I used to hate those things, but the resolution has gotten good enough now that I find them genuinely useful on certain vehicles and in certain conditions.

I’m an even bigger fan of the 2.4-kW 110-volt outlet in the cargo area. Drawing power from the high-voltage hybrid battery, it can provide more juice than I could ever need at a campsite. On the way to and from camp, I can plug a portable refrigerator into it and keep my stuff cold. The vehicle has to be on for the plug to work, but a good fridge should stay cold for hours or even days when not running. The cargo area is also deep enough to load my 65-liter cooler lengthwise.

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I also love the plug because I bring an air mattress. Don’t come at me, I’m an Eagle Scout. I paid my dues. Now, I prefer comfort, and the electric air pumps—portable or built-in—I use to fill my mattress tend to pull a ton of current on start-up and pop the breakers in most cars and 12-volt-to-110-volt converters. Not this one. It doesn’t even flinch. I do, however, wish there were another plug somewhere up in the passenger area where it’s easier to plug in a laptop so my wife could run her business from the road on the way to camp.

The Land Cruiser also has a big aftermarket, so there are plenty of options for external storage and rooftop tents, too. We recently upgraded the standard roof rails to a much stronger Prinsu steel roof rack sold through Toyota dealers, which we’ll cover in a future update. Suffice to stay, we can stick whatever we want up there now.

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It Can’t Do Everything

Whether your tent is mounted on the roof or freestanding, you have to bring one with you. Don’t show up to camp expecting to fold the rear seats and sleep in the back, because you won’t be happy. The Land Cruiser’s second-row seats don’t fold flat; they just fold down and create a 3.25-inch step up from the cargo floor. You can fold and tumble them forward, but that just creates a 6.5-inch drop from the cargo floor down to the floor below the seat. Either way, you’re not laying down back there without building a custom platform and further reducing your cargo space.

Annoyingly, this doesn’t mean the Land Cruiser has a low cargo floor that’s easy to lift things up onto. On the contrary, it’s unusually high, which makes loading heavy coolers a pain. Blame the 1.9-kWh hybrid battery under the cargo floor, though to be fair, it isn’t necessarily any better in other countries with nonhybrid gas or diesel engines. Those markets get an optional third-row seat taking up that space.

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Those markets do get a bigger fuel tank, though, and I’m envious. While everyone else gets a big 29-gallon tank, the U.S. buyer is saddled with a smaller 17.9-gallon tank for reasons Toyota USA doesn’t yet have an official answer to. (It’s not the hybrid battery, which is located above the floorpan.) At an average of 18.1 mpg (did we mention it’s a hybrid?), the farthest we’ve ever gone on a full tank so far is just 287 miles, about the same as a decent EV. It’s always a good idea to fill up before you leave civilization, but even more so with the Land Cruiser.

Thankfully, the kind of out-of-the-way places I like to camp aren’t typically more than 140 miles from the nearest gas station (gotta account for the trip back to refuel), but it became an issue on a big trip we’re itching to tell you about in a coming update. Limited range and wildly uneven floor aside, I still love the Land Cruiser as a camping rig, and I can solve those problems with an externally mounted gas can and a tent, the latter of which I, personally, was going to use anyway.

For More On Our Long-Term 2025 Toyota Land Cruiser:

• Our New Land Cruiser Has A Lot To Live Up To
• The New Toyota Land Cruiser’s Screens Make Us Scream