2025 Toyota Land Cruiser Yearlong Update: How to Drive It (Correctly)

Fundamentally, you drive every car the same because the controls are standardized. Each one wants to be treated a little differently, though, and adapting your driving style to the car you’re piloting can make a big difference in how smooth and comfortable the journey is. We’ve learned a few tricks that make driving our yearlong review 2025 Toyota Land Cruiser a lot more pleasant.

Once you’ve driven your car a while, you figure out its quirks. Letting someone else drive, though, quickly exposes everything you’ve been subconsciously correcting for. Any time someone new drives the Land Cruiser, it’s obvious they don’t know the tricks, so we’re going to spell them out.

Be Gentle With the Pedals

No one expects it on a big, burly, off-road SUV, but the Land Cruiser has surprisingly touchy pedals. You expect a truck like this to be lumbering and slow to react, but it’s the opposite. A little throttle or brake goes a long way, especially at low speeds.

The reason for this is in the hybrid powertrain. Toyota engineers are using the electric motor between the engine and transmission more for what’s called “torque fill” than for fuel economy. This means the instantaneous power of the electric motor at any speed is used to fill in the turbocharged inline-four’s lack of torque until the engine revs up and spools the turbo. Altogether, this greatly improves the powertrain’s total output.

The system could use more tuning, though. At parking lot speeds, stepping on the throttle pedal flips the electric motor on like a switch and causes the Land Cruiser to leap forward. It takes practice to just barely press the pedal, but it results in a much smoother experience.

It’s the same with braking. The electric motor is then being used in a regenerative capacity to recharge the hybrid battery, and it’s equally aggressive. Step on the brakes, and you’ll feel the truck nosedive as it kicks in. Gently press the brake pedal, and you avoid the whiplash. Practice your accelerating and braking inputs, and you’ll suddenly find you’re not being thrown around anymore.

It Can’t Really Drive on EV Power

Because it’s a hybrid, you might expect to be able to drive the Land Cruiser around on electric power only. You can, but it’s not easy. For one, there’s no EV mode. For another, Toyota doesn’t provide any screens showing you the battery state of charge or the threshold between electric-only acceleration and gas engine activation, so you have to feel it out as best you can.

If the battery is charged, you can drive the Land Cruiser around at parking lot speeds or slower in pure EV mode if you’re extremely gentle with the throttle pedal. Tiny taps will get you moving and maintain your speed, up to a few mph. Anything more, and it will fire up the gas engine, which feels so unnecessary at such low speeds. Be aware that at these low speeds, gear changes are very clunky.

Similarly, if you’re on the highway, you can sometimes get the Toyota’s gas engine to turn off and let the vehicle coast on electric power. You need to be on flat ground or, better yet, going downhill to trigger an engine shutdown. If you do get the gas engine to drop off, gentle touches of the throttle pedal can maintain your speed for several seconds at a time without waking the engine.

The reason it’s so hard comes down to the powertrain, again. The electric motor is on the small side compared to the truck it’s pushing, so it can only do so much before it needs help from the gas engine. Then there’s the battery, which at 1.9 kWh is quite small and can be drained pretty quickly moving a 5,557-pound Land Cruiser around.

Use the Cameras

The Land Cruiser doesn’t quite look as big as it is, nor does it feel massive from behind the wheel. The squared-off corners and big windows make it easy to see the edges of the car and know how much space you have to maneuver, generally, but that only gets you so far. This Toyota is both longer and wider than it appears to be, and it can make parking a challenge.

Thankfully, this upper trim level (of two) comes with a 360-degree camera, and it’s enormously useful for making sure you’re straight in a parking space and pulled in all the way. It’s triggered automatically if you put the truck in reverse or if the parking sensors pick up a nearby object, but you can also turn it on and off manually with a hard button on the dash below the climate controls. It even stays on after you shift from reverse to drive, so you don’t lose your view when maneuvering in a tight spot.

If it gets triggered by the parking sensors, it’ll automatically turn off when the sensors no longer sense an obstacle, which can be mildly frustrating if you’re not done maneuvering. If the camera gets triggered by shifting in to reverse or activated manually, it’ll stay on up to 8 mph.

Don’t Bother With Drive Modes, Unless …

Like most new cars, the Land Cruiser has drive modes, and they’re selected with a knob on the dashboard below the start button. The off-road modes, which can only be selected after pushing the MTS button, are very useful.

The on-road modes, which are the default on the knob, are so similar to one another that they may as well be useless. Eco mostly tones down the air conditioning, and Sport just makes the pedals even more sensitive. Just leave it in the default Normal mode for the best all-around results.

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​
• How We Decked Out Our Toyota Land Cruiser for a Trip to the Top of the World​
• I Drove Our 2025 Toyota Land Cruiser 8,000 Miles to the End of the Road​
• The Cold Never Bothered Our 2025 Land Cruiser, Anyway​