2005 Toyota Sequoia Preview

Shaking Up the SUV Market

The Sequoia is oh-so-smooth. This is a truck-based SUV?

From The Driver's Seat

It's a remarkable thing about Toyota: They really know better than almost any carmaker how to take a good idea and make it even better. You won't find BMW making a truck-based SUV, and yet a non-truck company like Toyota (save for tiny little micro-pickups ages ago and Land Cruisers that had more to do with Willys Jeeps than, say, F-150s) has transformed itself in about a decade into making SUVs that are the rival of any manufacturer in the business.

One of the ways they get that done is by clearly thinking about the goals that matter to their customers and then going out and exceeding expectations. Take cargo room. How is it that the both the Chevy Tahoe and Ford Expedition have less total cargo room than you get in a Sequoia (especially when the Ford is actually a longer vehicle)? Heck, how come the new Nissan Pathfinder Armada, which is just coming out now, has less overall cargo room? Didn't Nissan have ample time to study the Sequoia, which has been on the market for nearly half a decade?

Again, it comes back to values.

What Toyota does so well is decide what's important, and then hit solid home runs. That said, we're still going to gripe about a few decisions Toyota's made with this truck -- knowing full well that they're probably already on the job.

For instance, in order to get all that cargo room, the front passengers can easily reach out and touch the windshield, and the dash itself only extends a few inches from the firewall. Why is this important? Sitting this close to the squared-off dash now seems quite retro, and not in a good way. You feel a bit vulnerable, and that's odd when you're driving a 2.5-ton piece of steel.

Also, the dash of the Sequoia is a busy, not entirely well-sorted jangle of controls and buttons. Oh, don't get us wrong -- it's WAY better than the equivalent units in the last Chevy Tahoe we steered around (GM really must wake up and realize that the same dashboard in a $35,000 vehicle as it puts in a $15,000 only reinforces their reputation for interior cluelessness), but Toyota has always given interior design (not the placement of controls, the appearance of them) short shrift.

Sure, the buttons are nicely sized and everything has the right, sturdy feel at the helm of the Sequoia, but that doesn't mean any owner will have a sense that a company that cares about aesthetics waved a magic wand over this interior.

In fact, the Pathfinder Armada we drove recently (our full test drive will be out soon), despite some missteps in the quality of a few interior materials, has a much better aesthetic. One passenger got in the Nissan after being in a Ford Expedition and exclaimed, "I cannot believe these go for the same money!" And the Expedition looks a heck of a lot better inside than the Tahoe.

Another beef about the Sequoia -- one we've had with other Toyotas in the past -- is that it's all about being smooth. That is, yes, the interior fit and finish is without peer in this price range, but in terms of handling and acceleration, the Sequoia is softly sprung, so there's a lot of body roll even during casual cornering. And although the 4.6-liter V-8 is buttery, and shifts from the four-speed automatic are as clean as any in all of truckdom, the motor only knocks out 240hp and 315 ft.-lbs. of torque. Sounds like a lot in the torque department, but the Sequoia tips the scales at 5,134 lbs. Sadly, that's merely middleweight for the category, meaning acceleration isn't all that impressive, taking almost nine seconds to get to 60mph. Steering, too, is overly light. That's great in a parking lot, but with a soft, incommunicative ride, straying into another lane while changing a radio station is all too easy to do when piloting the Sequoia.

All of this merely highlights a flaw in the whole full-sized SUV formula.

SUVs are big, heavy, and not particularly easy to handle well. They're also space-inefficient. Meanwhile, a minivan still makes more sense for carrying people or cargo. You can get away with a lighter, smaller engine in Toyota's new Sienna minivan, you can put it on a car platform so it rides closer to the ground and becomes far more fuel efficient, and yet even with a smaller motor, get acceleration on a par with what the Sequoia offers. And inside the Sienna, there's still room for eight passengers, and more stuff fits inside than the Sequoia can carry.

And if you really need all-wheel-drive, rock crawling off-roading ability? Then you do want something like a Sequoia. There are a few people out there like that, it's true. But you're likely not one of them. Front-wheel-drive and traction/stability control will get you just about anywhere you need to go -- and there's far less rollover risk in a minivan than in an SUV.