I think it's going to be interesting to see how far Toyota takes this refresh because the Tacoma does need a lot of help, and it was designed for a market with no competition. The reintroduction of the Ranger was surprising, and the Gladiator was completely left field. Not to mention that the Canyon and Colorado are great trucks in their own rights, if imperfect.
Underneath, The Tacoma still has the bones of a truck that was redesigned for 2005... meaning a lot of the engineering work was done sometime just after Y2K. It feels like it on the road, too.
The interior is lots of hard plastics, shiny black plastic and the seating position isn't great either. The knobs are cheap, the radio buttons are brittle, etc.
The motor is rough and vibrates like crazy. It almost feels like a caricature of what a "truck engine" should feel like when you consider that the other 2GR-FKS variants are so smooth and polished.
The transmission jerks and buzzes through gears like a prototype - not a production Toyota car.
It's very loud on the road, theres lots of wind noise and the driving dynamics are sloppy, disconnected and choppy.
While we've all talked a lot about waiting for the next generation TNGA architecture in regard to the Land Cruiser, Tundra and 4Runner, I think the 2016 Tacoma was actually our first indication of "hurry up and wait." We all know the truck only has a slightly modified rear frame vs. the previous truck, with new sheetmetal and an updated V6. It's always been a bit of a half-assed effort. Toyota probably did as much as they could trying to modernize it with the plan for a full 2022/2023 redesign on the new TNGA-F architecture.
The difficult thing for Toyota is that the Tacoma used to exist in a class of one and all of it's competitors have significantly upstaged the truck. Colorado and Canyon are nice trucks with strong motors, better MPG, better infotainment and a slew of cool options and engines. The Ranger, while based on an older global platform, seems to be polished, posh, capable and versatile. It's also got the Ford truck cache with means a lot to some people (not me). Last, even if they sold the Gladiator with a 2 cylinder engine and crank windows, Jeep is going to sell the hell out of it because of how it looks. My point here is: the competitive set is completely different than it has been before and Toyota isn't ready.
At this point, selling ~20k units a month, it's one of the highest volume Toyota models and it's in a vulnerable position. However, to caveat all of this, they've been hitting that sales number capacity constrained with low inventory for a truck that - aside from the name - is probably worst in class, aside from the Frontier. So you could definitely make the argument they don't need to do much at all.
We'll see.
