2025 Toyota 4Runner: What's It Like to Live With?
We're going to spend a year with the Toyota 4Runner to see if it can capture our hearts and minds
| Miles Driven | Average MPG |
| 3,179 | 18.5 |
Latest Highlights
- We bought a 2025 Toyota 4Runner.
- It kicks off the sixth generation of the venerable SUV.
- It's a definite improvement over the previous generation.
- But is that enough?
What do you want to know about?
What We Got And Why
• Our test vehicle: 2025 Toyota 4Runner
Let's be real: The outgoing Toyota 4Runner was very, very dated. The fifth-generation 4Runner went on sale in 2010, and it soldiered on with only minor updates for 15 years. For 2025, though, the sixth-generation 4Runner arrived, promising a host of updates aimed at making the rig both more refined on-road and more capable off-road. Was Toyota successful in that mission? We have the next year to find out.
We just bought this 2025 4Runner TRD Pro to add to the Edmunds One-Year Road Test fleet. Over the next year and many thousands of miles, we'll be putting Toyota's best off-roader through its paces — in fact, it's already faced off against its more luxurious cousin, the Lexus GX, in an off-road comparison test.
Edmunds bought this vehicle for evaluation purposes.
All that performance comes at a cost
"There's an obvious cool factor to the 4Runner TRD Pro: The lifted suspension and knobby tires come together with this generation's aggressive styling to form a truly mean-looking rig. However, I imagine they also contribute to the harsh ride and rather unwieldy handling. This is not a vehicle I would ever consider daily driving, personally." — Ryan Greger, social media content strategist
A small, but not insignificant annoyance
"This is a pretty minor qualm, but it gets annoying. On most vehicles I've been in that have surround-view cameras, the camera display stays on for a few moments after shifting the vehicle out of reverse and into drive. This can be super helpful when making three-point turns or when maneuvering in tighter spaces, which can require shifting back and forth between drive and reverse. However, the 4Runner immediately turns off the camera display upon being shifted into drive, requiring you to press a button on the center console should you want to activate it again. It may sound nitpicky, but I encountered this situation multiple times over the course of a weekend, and it starts to get frustrating quickly." — Ryan Greger, social media content strategist