[adamdevigili]

My 1997 LX450 (4.5L I6) with armor (front/rear bumpers, sliders), a roof rack, other random accessories with a 2.5" lift and 33" tires gets about 11 MPG highway, and maybe 7-9 city. I take it off-road often, and on trails I get maybe...4-6?

It does come with the territory though, and anyone owning an 80 (and probably a 100 series) at this point isn't doing it really to "save money" imo.

That being said, the recently outgoing 200 series LC didn't really do all that much better[1], and neither does the new 300 series.[2]

[1] https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/bymodel/2021_Toyota_Land_Cru...

[2] https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/noframes/45010.shtml

[zaken]

Do people ever give you grief about the climate impact of owning a vehicle like that?

I don't mean to judge and am genuinely curious -- I have a fairly fuel inefficient vehicle as well and it weighs on me sometimes that I maybe should try different, more climate friendly hobbies (like, stopping overlanding and pick up knitting or something...)

[happytiger]

Yes, but the service life of a Land Cruiser 200 series is 25 years. There’s a profound amount of environmental impact beyond the gas pump, and most of it comes from building and shipping all the parts to assemble the automobile over and over again. The manufacturing process is profoundly environmentally destructive, so vehicles that have a longer service life (Land Cruiser is 2-2.5 times the average) have a role to play.

They are also one of the few petrol vehicles that are still built to this kind of standard, so they do demonstrate as the “smoking gun” that the industry itself engineers obsolescence into their vehicles and could do much better.

Somehow we’ve all been reduced to yakking on and on about fuel economy. There are 30,000 parts in the average car, and almost all of them are manufactured and shipped. What’s the impact of tens of thousands of components and built onsite for JIT manufacturing?

If we wanted to change this, we could do very easily. We would just need to put a sticker in the window of the car that says: “Designed to Last: 12 years” or whatever. That way people could make an informed decision and game theory would come in to effect. Auto makers know this information: every car has a design life of you wouldn’t have anything like the “25 year design life” of a Land Cruiser in the first place.

I consider it the impact of car and oil company propaganda, as they’ve narrowed the discussion to “miles per gallon” rather than the overall impact of design life and the constant need to remanufacture the same vehicle over and over again for the same customer throughout their lifetime.

The hidden danger is in the subtle propaganda of suggested talking points from industry that subtly moves the conversation over decades. Propaganda isn’t to tell us what to think, it’s to frame and influence the things we talk about and give us a industry favorable set of opinion talking points to frame a conversation that benefits the status quo.

The Land Cruiser is one of the last petrol vehicles that demonstrates without a doubt that we could be building to a much higher standard for viritually the same money. It was 84k when it went off the market in 2020, and Toyotas next most expensive vehicle with half the service life was about 75k. The Land Cruiser has a 10,000 usd tax because it isn’t assembled in North America, so double the service life vehicle can be delivered at the same price as the top end vehicle in a lineup. Its simply a choice by car companies not to do it.

But all we as a society can talk about is gas mileage, because that’s something the “industry can get behind.”

It’s something to bear in mind.

[yohannparis]

I mean, the environment impact on buying a vehicle that polute less might not be worth running this one to the ground.

Same argument I have with aquaintainces that switch their cars to an electric ones... it's worse at the end if your previous car was in working order.