Page 62 - Motor Trend (February 2020)
P. 62
HISTORY I Toyota Land Cruiser
2020 Land Cruiser has little in common
KOKORO wheel, their collective soul couldn’t be
with one from 1960, but from behind the
more obvious.
This FJ40 bouncing down a two-track
south of Salt Lake City, Utah, is a 1977
NO SHINKA doors on the back. On the street, the 40
model with front disc brakes and barn
series will just top 75 mph down a big
enough hill. But on the dirt, the skinny tires
and short wheelbase conspire to threaten
grievous bodily harm above 45 mph.
The 4.2-liter I-6 makes all of 135 hp and
210 lb-ft of torque, and I can only imagine
how much more dreadfully lethargic the
WORDS SCOTT EVANS
earlier 3.9-liter I-6 with a three-speed
ilbert Ryle derisively called it “the manual must’ve been. Maintaining speed
ghost in the machine,” critiquing uphill at freeway speeds is a lost cause, as
René Descartes’ theory of substance the four-speed manual’s ratios are widely
dualism, which posits that the mind spaced and the engine redlines at 4,000
Gand body are separate entities and rpm. There’s no tachometer to go by; just
presupposes the existence of the soul. wait for the shifter to start shaking like the
At a loss to articulate the way a car gearbox is about to explode, then shift up.
makes us feel, we often fall back on this It’s clearly a civilized military vehicle (a
philosophy. reverse-engineered Jeep, at its core), but
Ryle’s argument that the mind and body Land Cruisers, of course, cannot repro- for a truck with leaf springs at every corner
are one and the same falls mostly on the duce and are not self-aware. If artificial and power nothing, it’s not that punishing
side of behaviorism. But the less rigidly intelligence ever comes to cars, the Land to drive. Maybe it’s because they’re 42
defined Japanese concept of kokoro no Cruiser will be among the last to accept years old, but these springs aren’t espe-
shinka, which considers heart, mind, it, if it ever does. Yet the spirit of the Land cially stiff, and the dampers are keeping
emotion, and soul as one indivisible entity, Cruiser perseveres across decades of me from being thrown around as much as
best explains how the soul of a vehicle like mechanical rewrites, variants for different I’d expected.
the Toyota Land Cruiser can be preserved markets, and countless engineers and There’s 90 degrees of play in the wheel
across generations of machine. designers and salesmen. Mechanically, a before steering happens, but the effort is
62 MOTORTREND.COM FEBRUARY 2020
