To each their own I guess.
The 4Runner interior is workman-like and carefully assembled, with materials that will hold up to use, and some abuse, quite well. Appearance-wise, I find it a pleasant place to spend time and we have done many long father - son road trips in ours. The gauges are very legible and the controls, including the shifter, are very well placed and ergonomic to me. The truck runs and works perfectly almost 5-6 years later and it looks like new too.
Our 2016 SR5 Premium was about 40k out the door. Not cheap, but certainly not super expensive.
Those of you pining for better materials and what-not, certainly that exists in the market. The Europeans generally do a fine job with those things. But then you have to put up with cars that are fundamentally unreliable 5 or so years down the road. I’ve owned most of the major Euro brands and they are all the same. Idiotic things, often serious mechanical failures, and they are stupidly over priced to fix, particularly with the original parts. JGCs look good to me as well but family experience has been mixed. But in our house, Toyota (and Honda) have proven mechanically superior to everything else - no oil leaks, cv joint failures, cooling system explosions, turbo charger failures, fuel tank vapor leaks, etc. Toyotas, particularly when they are properly serviced and maintained, are vehicles that serve you; you don’t serve them and tiptoe around their multiple failure points and make excuses about the necessity of those failures to “save the environment” or in the name of performance. On that latter point, as someone who used to do a lot of amateur racing I can tell you all of those compromises you would make for performance are typically useless in a street application. Go for reliability and robustness on your daily driver.
We can go around and around all day, but I am probably on the older end of the demographic here and I can tell you the biggest luxury provided by a truck or car is reliable service, without drama or fuss that consumes or otherwise wastes the owner’s time and money.
Toyota sells a ton of cars, and 4Runners, because they ignore the idiots from the car magazines and understand what their owners expect. The 4Runner is exactly what it should be.
