It’s hard not to feel a bit melancholy about the passing of the torch from the outgoing 2021 Toyota Tundra to the next one. The current Tundra feels a bit like the thinking person’s truck, forgoing many—not all, but many—of the excessively macho design flourishes, leaving behind a truck that simply works. The new one for 2022 appears to have given into some of those design trends, so here’s hoping it looks better in person. Meanwhile, the less flashy ’21 model is still great inside and out, towing or not, on-road and off.
After spending a couple weeks with the 2021 Tundra TRD Pro CrewMax, I can confidently say that it still holds up against many of the competing trucks out there. This second-gen Tundra has been with us since 2007, with its last significant refresh in 2014. Yet its relatively conservative updates over the years have been sensible items that just work and the 5.7-liter V8 (that’s not long for this world in this truck) is a smooth, torquey wonder that makes towing—despite its sub-10,000-pound max capacity—a breeze.
Thus, towing a race car is exactly what I did with the Tundra TRD Pro. I hauled my deeply questionable 1971 Volkswagen 411 out to the Gambler 500 Mexico based out in Terlingua, Texas, near Big Bend. The 411 struggles with both hills and highway speeds, and a large chunk of Texas Hill Country and freeway stood between myself and desert Gambler glory. As much as an old aircooled VW belongs in the desert, I also didn’t feel like leaving it stranded out there for the second time in a month.
A Gambler 500 run also provided plenty of opportunities for it to do actual truck stuff—not just towing, but hitting a few trails in the area. It’s time to test a truck out in nature where it really belongs.
The TRD Pro is the most off-road-focused of all the Tundras, with TRD standing for the marque’s Toyota Racing Development fun stuff department. It comes stock with Rigid Industries fog lights that look exactly like the kind of thing you’d impulse-buy from 4 Wheel Parts, and it rides on black 18-inch TRD Pro-specific BBS alloy wheels. TRD Pro leather-trimmed front bucket seats help hold you in place, the TRD Pro front skidplate protects the most important bits off-road and the power moonroof lets you admire wherever it is that you’ve ended up from inside the car.
The TRD Pro comes with TRD-tuned Fox shocks with piggyback reservoirs and three-stage compression dampening. Those fancy lil’ reservoirs are designed to increase fluid capacity and keep more of it out of the main shock assembly itself, keeping said fluid cooler and enabling you to mess around on rough terrain for longer without as much shock fade or wear to the whole system. Overall, though, those three letters don’t get you as much here as they do on some of Toyota’s other trucks. While the TRD Pro Tacoma and 4Runner are among the most capable off-road vehicles in their classes, the Tundra TRD Pro’s size, age, and lack of advanced off-road features like a locking rear differential mean its firmly in the «more capable than your average truck» camp and definitely not a Raptor hunter.
Under the hood is Toyota’s beloved 5.7-liter V8 cranking out 381 horsepower and 401 pound-feet of torque that gets sent through a six-speed automatic transmission—did I mention this truck has been around since the Bush administration? The TRD Pro features a four-wheel-drive system with an electronically controlled transfer case, making it as easy as turning a dial to engage four-high and four-low. Toyota thankfully expected this 14-mpg-combined truck to do some thirsty work and gave it a 38-gallon fuel tank accordingly.
This test truck also wore TRD’s trippy Lunar Rock paint, which shifts from looking bluish to greenish depending on the light. I’m generally anti-grey on cars as I miss real colors, but Lunar Rock is simply weird enough that it won me over.
The «CrewMax» part of this truck’s name denotes that it’s the big four-door cabin—as opposed to the Double Cab with its half-size rear doors—which sacrifices some bed space in the name of putting big old Cadillac broughams to shame in the interior space department. There’s only a 5.5-foot bed to compensate for the extra people space, and while that’s great for someone like me who does have a number of tools, manuals and spares for the race car she’d rather keep out of the elements, whether that’s enough for you will obviously depend on your own needs.
The best toys all too often need a trailer. This is the case with the highly questionable beaters I love, including and especially a rich-running, farty, slow Volkswagen I planned on driving all over unpaved parts of Big Bend that might or might not break it. (For what it’s worth, the VW didn’t completely break, but my wheeling partner Charles did have to clean off fouled spark plugs with sandstone along the side of one of the longer trails. Don’t off-road alone, folks.)
The good news is that the Toyota Tundra TRD Pro is a dream to tow with, comfortably appointed inside and more than capable at handling it. With a tow capacity of just 9,200 pounds, a car on a trailer won’t completely disappear behind it as it would with a more heavy-duty truck. You will notice the extra weight every now and then on steeper grades, though the naturally-aspirated engine’s smooth and predictable torque curve make it easy to handle.
However, Toyota does include a Tow/Haul button to compensate on the uphill climbs where you are most likely to remember that there’s a trailer behind you trying (and mostly failing) to drag you back downhill. Press the Tow/Haul button, and the Tundra holds lower gears longer, adding engine braking to help slow the truck down on downhills while also giving it extra oomph for uphills. Eat turds, physics!
Tow/Haul mode comes at a price, though—at the fuel pump. Under normal, non-towing conditions, the Tundra’s rated by the EPA for 17 mpg on the highway. I found that was a pretty accurate figure, even with my heavy foot. Combine that foot with a towing a car on an open trailer in Tow/Haul mode, though, and at one point on one of the gnarlier climbs out to the Gambler 500, I saw 7.4 mpg on the Tundra’s dashboard. To be fair, though, that number hovered around a more generous 10 mpg on other, flatter parts of the tow where I only used Tow/Haul as needed.
There is another potential cost while towing with the Tundra, too: That 5.7-liter V8 moves, even with a car behind it. Take your eyes off the speedometer for too long, and you might start sweating buckets whenever Waze barks out «police reported ahead.» You won’t be wanting for power to pass slower traffic, even on uphills.
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