Toyota goes tailor-made

Toyota's Prado comes with every conceivable safety item. Photo / Alastair Sloane

Toyota plans to emerge from the rubble of the recession with a plan to provide more flexibility for its New Zealand customers.

One idea it is looking at is based loosely on supercar clubs, where members pay an annual fee to get access to a variety of exotics.

Only Toyota would tailor its scheme to suit the customer's specific needs. For example, a finance package where the customer mostly drove a Camry but needed a Prado 4WD every second weekend.

Toyota Finance managing director Brent Knight says the carmaker's finance arms worldwide have a degree of licence to explore such concepts.

"There isn't a model that we have in our minds or is in use anywhere else in the world," he said.

"We are thinking of a customer who needs transportation over the next three years but whose needs change from season to season, or project to project.

"Say someone who needs a Hilux for the back blocks, a Prado on the ski slopes, or an Aurion for three months in town.

"Our thinking is a longer-term commitment but with flexibility in terms of what that solution is."

Knight says there is no actual skeleton in place. "At this stage it's too early for us and we are only really in the throes of putting these ideas through to Japan.

"I know that in the United States they're looking at it and we will be looking at it probably in the new year.

"I'm pretty confident that we will get support for it but it would be the second half of next year before you saw anything from us."

Knight believes the scheme would be easy to put in place.

"We think we have a sensational product range to cover off that broad range of needs. Plus we've got the scale and logistics capability to make it happen."

Roughly one in every four cars on New Zealand roads is a Toyota. The best-selling passenger car so far this year is the Corolla. Toyota has 25 per cent of the four-wheel-drive market.

But its long-time share of government fleet business has declined, eaten into largely by the diesel offerings of South Korea's Hyundai and Kia.

No surprise, then, that there are no petrol-powered variants in the fourth-generation Land Cruiser Prado range. Only about five out of every 100 buyers bought the third-generation V6 petrol model anyway, says Toyota.

The new model gets a revised version of the company's D-4D 3-litre turbo-diesel unit, which produces 127kW and 410Nm of torque and drives all four wheels through either a six-speed manual or five-speed automatic gearbox.

Toyota says CO2 emissions have been reduced from 245 grams per kilometre in the outgoing model to 225gr/km in the new automatic model, an improvement of 8 per cent. Fuel consumption is down 9 per cent - 8.5 litres/100km (33mpg) for the automatic and 8.8 (32mpg) for the manual.

The carmaker says it will voluntarily continue to aim for a fleet C02 target of 170gr/km, the limit the Labour government wanted in place for New Zealand by 2015.

"We are not giving up on it," says managing director Alistair Davis. "We are still targeting 170 grams. We have a strategy in place to meet it."

The National Government abandoned the target, saying the benefits would have been outweighed by the cost to motorists.

Said Transport Minister Steven Joyce: "While most countries deal with only a small number of importers and manufacturers, New Zealand does not have a domestic vehicle manufacturing industry and imports a large number of used vehicles through several thousand importers.

"This means the proposed scheme would have been difficult and costly to carry out."

Transport fuels will be included in the Emissions Trading Scheme. From next July, petrol and diesel will cost between 3-5c more under ETS.

The three-model Prado range starts with the GX manual at $78,490, the GX auto at $79,990, the VX auto at $89,990 and the VX Ltd at $104,990.

The vehicle is longer, wider but slightly lower in height than the outgoing model.

It sits on the same suspension set-up as the big Land Cruiser 200 series and comes with every conceivable safety item, including anti-lock brakes calibrated for off-road use.

Ride and handling is predictable, dynamics sharper. Briefly, it's a deadly serious off-road performer with good road manners, easily suited to both environments.

All three models are chockablock with new technology, some of which Toyota NZ technicians haven't seen before.

Front and rear diffs can be locked for off-road work and the VX Ltd gets Crawl Control as standard.

It's a cruise control system that provides the necessary throttle inputs to keep the Prado moving over rough and tumble ground at between 1-5km/h.

All the driver has to do is hang on to the helm.