I have a question:

When towing a heavy load, going up or down a hill, I thought you should switch to 4Lo, because it gives you extra low end torque.

I don't understand how this is useful, as you cannot engage 4Lo on dry pavement...?

What am I missing here? Say I have a boat that I am towing, and I am coming up on a winding hill. I am not supposed to engage the 4Lo on the pavement, so what use is it?

Appreciate all help

no, that's not how you tow (and you shouldn't need lower gearing for a trailer within the manufacturers towing capacity)

you can use 4lo to pull a boat up a ramp or get up a gravel hill or something, but otherwise your load is already on the rear axle so you should have plenty of traction.

also, you have to come to a complete stop to engage 4wd low, it's not something you can shift into on the fly so it wouldn't be useful in your example.

what use is 4lo? Offroading when you need to go slow over obstacles and want maximum torque and engine breaking but don't need to go fast.

When you're sitting in the driver's seat, you'll find that there's a pedal under your right foot. Press down on it. Hard if necessary.

This just isn't the use-case for 4lo. It's not really useful for anything other than off-road driving and landscape work (pulling stumps, re-positioning big rocks, etc.).

Your 4Runner is capable of pulling any trailer up to and quite a bit beyond the max tow rating up any paved public road in America using high range. There is absolutely no need for a lower gear range. The only time I've ever needed 4lo on a paved public road was an '86 Subaru GL wagon loaded up with 12 people and ski gear going to the top of 12k-foot Loveland Pass in Colorado. It's 85 carbureted hamsters gasping for air in the high altitude just weren't enough.

You should try low range for yourself so you understand it. It's REALLY low (not compared to some rock crawlers, but REALLY low compared to any ordinary highway vehicle). I haven't done a speed trial but I'm guessing 5th gear low range revs out somewhere between 50 and 60mph.

This is actually the optimum time to put your shifter in S-Mode and use the gears manually to help control your engine and vehicle speed. Get a dealer to explain and demonstrate S-mode to you while you are test driving one. It's like having a manual transmission with no clutch.

Unlike manual transmission the S-mode works as a limiter from the top gear selection, not a particular gear selection. What it does it does not allow automatic transmission to engage gears higher then selected. For example when S3 is selected the transmission will still start with 1-st, then 2-nd and then 3-rd. If you speed up the engine rpm will go all the way to red line but will still be on the third gear. But if transmission uses 3-rd gear while coasting and you step on the gas hard, the transmission will go to 1-st or 2-nd on it's own (even s-3 in s-mode is selected). So it is kind of "manual". It is mostly used for engine breaking going downhill or preventing from "searching a gear" while driving slight incline.

Newbie guilty as charged...read the manual but still managed to grind the gears on transfer case as well as the automatic transmission while trying to get it back to 2wd. After a sleepless night of thinking i severely damaged my brand new TRDOP, I took her out this morning to a muddy delta road across the river in Arkansas and practiced shifting between 4H to 4L (following proper procedures) and there was no grinding and it shifted very easily. The grinding was disconcerting; should I take it in to the dealership or just monitor it? My Jeeps were more forgiving to my missteps.

I lucked out. I live on several open, flat acres of dirt. The closest paved road is a mile away to the north. To the east, west, and south it's much much farther.
So that first night doing laps inside our fence from 2H to 4H and back no problem (duh).
I managed to get it into 4L, even a blind squirrel occasionally finds a nut. Getting it out of 4L was a different story.
Read through the manual until I found my 2nd, golden, nut. TRANSMISSION IN NEUTRAL! (and foot on the brake)
Where I live I frequently use 4x4. Might not always be necessary, but it keeps things from binding from non use. It even says so in the manual.

Sent from my SM-G955U using Tapatalk

Old thread but...do I think it works like a vehicle I had 10 years ago? Or even 20? Yeah I do. Exactly the same. It's old school technology. I personally have no problem with that but I have been working on vehicles for a long time and also work in the driveline and axle business.

Anyway, it's totally equivalent to any 231-equipped (part time T case) Jeep I have ever had. Except those don't have Atrac. Guilty not found. This is why the 242 T case is so much more preferred in the Jeep world, it has 2wd, plus the full time 4x4 option where there is a center diff, plus the part time option where the center diff is locked. My wife had one and I used to tell her "just use full time when it gets slippery and leave it at that." That's Jeeps though. I wish the 4Runner had a full time option but that we could also select 2wd like the 242 select trac in a Jeep. Instead, we get either full time AWD with no 2wd (limited models) or part time 4wd (everyone else).

Very helpful thread though to those not familiar with transfer cases in general and how 4wd works. Thanks for posting this, even if it was 4 years ago.

Sadly, we have a 16 year old who just got a permit in the family and we are looking for a car for her. I don't think she is able to comprehend this all, and thus I will be steering to something that is more "set it and forget it" when it gets slippery out. Otherwise I would probably just give her my 2012 SR5 4Runner and buy a new one. Instead I am thinking something AWD or with a full time 4wd option (WJ/WK, maybe even a cheaper AWD 4th gen T4R)

She has enough issues driving already without worrying about the shifting back and forth which has become second nature to me over the last 25 years. This goes for a lot of other people on the road too, unfortunately. If they aren't mechanical by nature, they often don't grasp the concept without a lot of coaching.

Do you think I need to take it into the dealership to see if there’s any damage? Everything seems to be smooth and no fluids on the ground.

Sorry for responding to an old thread; I had multiple threads open on my iPad and I overlooked the date.

Nah dude, not at all. You're good. Just change T case fluid at whatever the next interval is for you. Don't lose any sleep over it.

I have never tested the rev limiter on mine in manual mode, but wouldn't it also have a fail safe to upshift against your wishes if you were bouncing off of the rev limiter? Most auto trans vehicles do these days.

Manual mode is more of a driver "suggestion" than actual gear selection because the computer programming usually won't let the engine blow itself up.

Select drive 4WD 5th gens don't have a center diff.

You will bind up so don't use it on road unless there's a shit ton of snow and ice.

Not exactly as the old Hertz ad said. See my earlier posts in this thread. Key is don’t make any sharp turns, keep it straight.

I've turned lots of times when transitioning from snow and ice to wet or dry asphalt in CO. It's not the end of the world, even if you can feel it bind.