Toyota Knows Few Japanese Buyers Want A LHD Made-In-America Tundra Pickup, But It’s Selling It There Anyway

Typically, when we think of forbidden fruit, we’re thinking about the cool cars sold in other countries that we don’t get in the U.S., but it’s easy to forget that the U.S. gets plenty of cars that aren’t sold in other countries, too. So it’s pretty significant that Toyota is planning to offer the full-size Tundra in Japan, along with the Highlander and, eventually, the Camry. Why anyone in Japan would want an America-sized pickup truck, I have no idea, but maybe Toyota sees an untapped market that’s larger than you’d expect. Except the brand doesn’t expect to sell many at all. 

How do I know this? I wish I could tell you I got the information from a highly classified source inside Toyota, but I’m not nearly charming enough to pull that off. Instead, I simply read the press release, where Toyota spelled it out in plain language. According to the release from Toyota Global, the Japanese automaker expects to sell 80 Tundras a month in its home market, while Highlander sales are predicted to be half that. Doing a little back-of-the-napkin math, that works out to fewer than 1,500 sales a year. For comparison, Toyota sold 12,949 Tundras in the U.S. last month alone. 

Because Toyota knows there’s basically no demand for a full-size pickup truck or an aging three-row crossover in Japan, anyone who buys one will only have a single trim option available. If they go with the Tundra, they’ll get the 1794 Edition, and if it’s the Highlander, they’ll get the Limited ZR Hybrid. Want something different? You’ll have to find it elsewhere. 

As far as pricing goes, Toyota plans to sell the Tundra 1794 Edition for ¥12,000,000 and the Highlander Limited ZR Hybrid for ¥8,600,000. At current conversion rates, that’s about $75,500 for the Tundra and $54,16 for the Highlander, but you typically get a better picture of what something really costs when you compare it to what else you can buy in the same country for similar money. Here’s what a few notable base-model Toyotas cost in Japanese yen:

• Toyota Corolla – ¥2,279,200
• Toyota Crown Signia – ¥5,150,000
• Toyota GR86 – ¥2,936,000
• Toyota Prius – ¥2,769,800
• Toyota RAV4 – ¥4,500,000
• Toyota Land Cruiser 300 – ¥5,252,500
• Toyota Century Sedan – ¥23,000,000

Of course, they aren’t exactly direct competitors, but you could load up a Land Cruiser 300, the full-fat version we don’t get here in the U.S., and still pay about 40% less than if you bought a Highlander. Meanwhile, the Tundra is shaping up to be the most expensive non-Century vehicle that Toyota sells in Japan. Oh, and there’s also one other factor working against Tundra and Highlander sales — they’ll all be wrong-hand drive. 

Yes, since Toyota already expects to find essentially zero buyers at home, it can’t justify the cost to convert either vehicle to right-hand drive. Meaning anyone who does buy a Tundra to flex on their neighbors will have to learn how to drive their giant-ass Buc-ee’s truck while sitting on the wrong side of the car. That’s hard enough to get used to while driving a tiny Japanese or British car on America’s wide streets, but a full-size pickup truck on narrow Japanese roads? That sounds like a special level of hell. 

Then again, these vehicles were never really meant to sell. Toyota’s doing this specifically to make Trump happy. And considering his Iran boondoggle just kicked off a global energy crisis that’s also hurting Japan, I’m not even convinced Toyota will hit its already-low projections beyond maybe the first month or two. Before the war, buying a left-hand-drive Tundra might have been a flex in some circles, but now? With the government fighting hard to keep gas under ¥200 a liter, how many people who would have bought one before the war no longer want to be seen driving a symbol of America and its endless cycle of wars in the Middle East?