Our 2025 Toyota Land Cruiser Is a Hybrid, but It Doesn’t Act Like One
You wouldn’t know it by the fuel economy or even by looking at it, but yes, it’s a hybrid.
In case you didn’t know, all new Toyota Land Cruisers are hybrids. It’s cool if you didn’t know, though, because it seems like Toyota tried really hard to downplay it, and the fuel economy of our long-term Land Cruiser certainly doesn’t scream “save money on gas,” either.
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We’ve had our yearlong review 2025 Toyota Land Cruiser a full year now, and in that time we’ve put 26,829 miles on it. We’re a long way past the engine break-in period, and we have more than enough data to say, confidently, that the fuel economy really isn’t great. After nearly 27,000 miles of driving, we’re averaging 18.4 mpg despite EPA ratings of 22/25/23 mpg city/highway/combined.
Are Ya Sure About That?
At least, it’s consistent. When it was brand new, we managed just over 19 mpg, but since then it’s always been 18-point-something. A dozen staff members have driven it over the past dozen months, so it’s not just a case of one lead-footed driver, either. In fact, 9,818 of those miles were added on an epic road trip to the top of Alaska and back, nearly all of which was highway mileage where the Land Cruiser should be at its most efficient, according to the EPA. Yet it averaged 18 mpg.
But wait! Right before it left for Alaska, we installed a Prinsu roof rack and an iKamper rooftop tent. Surely, that must be ruining the average, no? Not really. While both were installed, fuel economy dropped to 17.7 mpg. Before the rack was installed, it was doing 19.2 mpg and after we took the tent off in Seattle on the way home from Prudhoe Bay (but left the rack on) it was doing 18.4, and it’s been doing about that ever since. Losing less than 1 mpg because of the roof rack still isn’t great, but even without it we never came anywhere near the EPA ratings.
The simple fact of the matter is, the Land Cruiser is a box on wheels with an upright windshield, off-road tires, and full-time four-wheel drive. All of these things are bad for fuel economy and worse when added together. That’s not great, especially considering it requires premium fuel, and that stuff ain’t cheap, especially right now.
As a result, the Land Cruiser struggles to go 300 miles on a tank of fuel. In all our driving, we only ever managed to break 300 miles twice, and both times we intentionally pushed it to empty knowing we were near a local fuel station, not out on the highway somewhere. Were it able to return its EPA-rated fuel economy, it would be able to do up to 412 miles on a tank. And people complain about EVs not getting their advertised range.
Part of the issue is the fuel gauge and distance to empty meter keep secrets. The Land Cruiser has a 17.9-gallon fuel tank, but we’ve never been able to put more than 15.5 gallons in it even when the gauges say it’s bone dry and range is zero miles. This means there’s a roughly 2.5-gallon reserve even when the gauges say you’re out of gas. Helpful if you know that, but it took us the entire year to figure it out. At 18.4 mpg average, that could mean another 46 miles of range, which sure would’ve been helpful to know in northern Alaska.
