2026 Toyota Tundra review

The Toyota Tundra finally arrived in local showrooms late in 2024, after a lengthy evaluation period that saw this big pickup truck leased to selected customers to confirm it met the exacting quality standards set by the Japanese brand.

But really, we’ve been waiting a lot longer than a year or so to get a full-size pickup truck from the number one brand in Australia. This is the third generation of Tundra, a nameplate that first appeared in 1999 as a replacement for the 1993 T-100 which was a bit too ‘stretched HiLux’ for American tastes.

That’s exactly who the Tundra was conceived for: Americans. Oh sure, it’s been offered in markets like Canada and Mexico and of course now Australia, but first and foremost this is a vehicle targeting the heart of the American car market in which pickups like the Ford F-Series reign supreme.

The Tundra has amassed a loyal following in the US, but it has never come even remotely close to knocking off Ford, Chevrolet or Ram off the pickup podium despite the strength of the Toyota brand over there.

The Australian market is a very different one, however. These pickups sell in much lower volumes relative to the rest of the market, with utes like the Toyota HiLux and Ford Ranger dominating the sales charts here in the way the Ford F-Series does there.

The full-size American pickup segment is also much newer. Sure, there have been local conversion companies that have brought in vehicles – including previous Tundras – over the years, but this segment was conceived in earnest when factory-backed Ram Trucks Australia started delivering pickups here in 2015.

Like Ram and Chevrolet, Toyota has tapped local company Walkinshaw to remanufacture the Tundra in right-hand drive.

Of course, in Toyota’s pursuit of perfection – as the Tundra marks the first time Toyota has outsourced right-hand drive remanufacturing to a third party, so it wanted to get it right – the Tundra has arrived here later than all its rivals.

How much does the Toyota Tundra cost?

The expression goes “a day late, a dollar short”. Well, the Tundra certainly isn’t a dollar short. In fact, the Tundra is the priciest vehicle in this segment.

It launched here only in a well-specified Limited trim, but this has subsequently been joined this year by the Platinum which is a whopping $32,045 more than a top-spec Ford F-150 Limited, $13,040 more than a Ram 1500 Limited, and $31,490 more than a Chevrolet Silverado 1500 ZR2.

To see how the Toyota Tundra lines up against the competition, check out our comparison tool

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What is the Toyota Tundra like on the inside?

The Toyota Tundra looks and feels like a proper modern American pickup truck inside.

You get big, comfortable front seats, an enormous centre console with plenty of storage, a big touchscreen, and plenty of space.

There’s only a black colour scheme available, but blue stitching details and faux metallic air vent accents do their part to provide a bit of contrast. There’s also elegant ambient lighting, which you can toggle on and off via a button near the controls for the expansive panoramic sunroof.

The faux brushed metal trim on the dashboard is dark and unconvincing, however, and the extensive use of gloss black trim on the centre console results in almost instantly visible dust and smudges.

Most of the dashboard, doors, and centre console sides are finished in soft-touch trim, though the dash in particular feels like a thin bit of leatherette stretched over a hard chunk of plastic.

The seats are wonderful, and boast heating, ventilation, and a genuinely good massage function with multiple modes and five different levels of intensity – try the centripetal mode in particular, which also massages your thighs and buttocks.

While there’s plenty of physical switchgear, the massage function is oddly buried in the Vehicle menu on the touchscreen where most cars with this feature would have a physical button on the side of the seat.

There are some quirks of the right-hand drive conversion. The passenger seat has an adjustable thigh extender, while the driver’s seat doesn’t. The infotainment system’s anchored shortcut bar is also on the passenger side of the screen, which makes it a big reach for the driver.

Walkinshaw also didn’t switch the indicator stalk over to the correct (for our market) right-hand side, so in this respect the Tundra is an outlier in Toyota showrooms.

You also do without embedded satellite navigation. That means you’ll need to connect Apple CarPlay or Android Auto and, if you’re driving somewhere without good reception, you’ll probably need to download some offline maps.

Apple CarPlay connects wirelessly, but Android Auto requires you to connect to a USB-A outlet on the centre stack itself. That means you have an ugly cord dangling across the dash, and you don’t get fast charging. You’ll find the other USB outlets – one USB-A, one USB-C – positioned at the front of the centre console bin.

The sound system is, frankly, pretty disappointing for a car at this price point with only average audio quality. Couldn’t Toyota have chucked in at least a Bose unit or something?

The infotainment system has crisp, bright graphics – Toyota has thankfully moved away from its years of dreary, washed-out blue screens – and is easy to navigate. The typefaces are large, too, so you definitely won’t need to put on your readers.

The digital instrument cluster is also clear and legible, with analogue-look gauges for the speedometer, turbo boost, and hybrid system. You don’t need to look down here for your speed, as Toyota has also fitted a handy head-up display.

iPhone users or Android users not plugging in can use the wireless phone charger which is positioned almost vertically at the base of the centre stack, and in plain view of the driver.

It sits ahead of a storage area large enough to accommodate even a 1.5L bottle of water, behind which you’ll find a pair of large cupholders and a cavernous centre console bin.

There’s plenty of clever storage up front. The centre console bin features a little sliding tray as part of its lid, giving you a place to put, for example, a phone while simultaneously covering up a small opening to the bin underneath. You can push this back into the lid and the rest of the lid will open as one giant U-shaped bit of plastic and leatherette, looking a bit like a plush toilet seat in the process.

We appreciate the physical climate controls which are ergonomically positioned and satisfying to use, while below this switchgear you’ll find a row of other physical switches including a handy button to turn on the high-resolution surround-view camera system.

There’s only one thing we’ll ding the camera system for, and that’s for how footage appears when the headlights are switched on. In a dark parking lot, for example, you’ll find the reversing camera view in particular gets washed out when the headlights turn on, making it harder to see what’s behind you.

Toyota has helpfully included a digital rear-view mirror, handy if you’re carrying a large load that’s blocking your view out the rear window. You can simply turn this off with the pull of a lever and enjoy a traditional mirror.

There are a handful of controls you may miss, tucked over to the right of the steering wheel. The heated steering wheel button, for example, is buried over here instead of being positioned on the wheel itself.

One other odd thing we noticed about the Tundra interior was a persistent but fairly subdued noise that sounded like a massaging seat that had been turned on, even when neither front massaging seat was on.

The second row isn’t as good as its rivals. Oh sure, it’s positively palatial compared to a HiLux, but there’s a prominent driveline hump where some rivals have almost completely flat floors.

The slightly raised centre seat means someone 180cm tall will find their head touching the roof, with the driveline hump eating into their legroom. It means the Tundra isn’t as good at carrying three adults abreast in the rear as its rivals.

Outboard seat occupants are sitting pretty, though, with both heating and ventilation. Other amenities for rear-seat passengers include a pair of USB outlets, a fold-down centre armrest, and front seatback map pockets.

There are also ISOFIX child seat anchor points for the outboard seats, as well as top-tether points for all three seats.

In the lined and well-lit tub, there are metal tie-down points at each corner. There are also four chunky plastic ones on the sides of the tub, which you can unfasten and slide along the rail.

There’s a power tailgate, which opens and closes with the push of a button. You won’t find any clever steps built into the bumper or which fold out from the tailgate, however.

Our tester didn’t come with a tonneau cover, but Toyota’s range of Tundra accessories includes one.

To see how the Toyota Tundra lines up against the competition, check out our comparison tool

What’s under the bonnet?

All Toyota Tundras sold in Australia feature a twin-turbo V6 hybrid powertrain, though overseas you can get a twin-turbo V6 sans electrification.

Toyota insists on calling the Tundra’s engine a 3.5-litre despite having a displacement of 3445cm3. It also doesn’t publish a fuel consumption figure as it isn’t required to, given the Tundra’s GVM is north of 3500kg.

Despite being the only hybrid in its segment in Australia, in our testing of the Tundra we found it to achieve slightly worse fuel consumption than its twin-turbo V6 and naturally aspirated V8 petrol rivals.

We tested the Tundra Platinum across an identical loop to the Chevrolet Silverado 1500 LTZ and ZR2 and Ford F-150 XLT, covering a mix of inner-city, suburban and highway driving.

Across this, we recorded 14L/100km against 12.9L/100km and 13.7L/100km for the V8-powered Silverado LTZ and ZR2, respectively. The F-150 also beat the Tundra narrowly, with consumption of 13.9L/100km recorded.

To see how the Toyota Tundra lines up against the competition, check out our comparison tool

How does the Toyota Tundra drive?

This may be a Toyota hybrid, but it’s not like any Toyota hybrid we’ve ever been offered in Australia.

You won’t find a little EV Mode button in the cabin, nor will you experience the elastic band feeling of a continuously variable transmission. You will hear the ethereal hum of the acoustic alert at low speeds, but otherwise it doesn’t feel all that… hybrid-y.

Sometimes in urban driving, when you pull up to a light, you’ll find the engine stays on and idles and the automatic stop/start doesn’t engage – this happened a couple of times with our tester, even with roughly 40 per cent battery charge. That’s very unlike other Toyota hybrids.

There’s plenty of grunt from the twin-turbo 3.4-litre V6 hybrid, and you’ll need to be light with your right foot because you can chirp the rear tyres very easily.

The V6 actually has a lovely snarl to it, though the cabin is appropriately hushed even at highway speeds.

While road and wind noise are well-contained like in the F-150, the Ford still has the edge in refinement. The Tundra’s 10-speed auto has the occasional abrupt shift, while you’ll sometimes feel a rough transition between petrol and electric power.

You can manually shift the Tundra, though this is done only with the shifter as there are no paddles behind the steering wheel.

In more ways than one, the Tundra is reminiscent of an F-150. That goes beyond the on-paper similarities – both feature a twin-turbo V6 and a 10-speed auto – and extends to the way it feels to drive.

Whereas the Ram 1500 and Chevrolet Silverado 1500 feel a little more truck-like to drive, the Tundra and F-150 feel easier to drive with light steering. The tiller feels a little isolated, but it makes this big pickup easy to manoeuvre in urban areas and parking lots.

We’d probably still give the edge to the Ford in terms of ease of driving, but the Tundra is a close second.

One slightly disorienting thing about the Tundra to drive is the shape of its bonnet. It appears to slope away towards the front end, creating the optical illusion of the vehicle turning.

In terms of ride comfort, it feels more firmly suspended than a Silverado 1500, but still with the level of cushiness expected of an American pickup. You will experience body-on-frame shudders on occasion and the rear wheels can skip a bit over some bumps, while the live rear axle can feel feel a bit fidgety at the rear on patchwork pavement.

However, the Tundra generally feels plush. It also proved comfortable across unsealed roads.

Like its rivals, this is a capable highway cruiser. The adaptive cruise control works well, and when it’s switched on, the well-calibrated lane-keep system gains lane centring capabilities. You can traverse hundreds of kilometres without a care in the world.

While we didn’t take the Tundra off-road, it does have selectable low-range gearing. Unlike most vehicles in this segment, however, it lacks a full-time four-wheel drive mode suitable for use on pavement, for example on wet roads. It also lacks locking differentials.

Previous tow testing of the Tundra has revealed the big pickup can haul a 3200kg caravan without feeling wobbly or loose over country roads, though we did experience some nose-to-tail bobbing.

There’s a specific Tow/Haul mode, as well as a trailer back up guide that can autonomously control the steering to assist in reversing.

To see how the Toyota Tundra lines up against the competition, check out our comparison tool

What do you get?

While there’s a much wider range of Tundra variants in the US, where it’s built, thus far there are only two in Australia.

2026 Toyota Tundra Limited equipment highlights:

• 20-inch alloy wheels
• 18-inch space-saver spare
• LED headlights
  • Dusk sensing
  • Manual levelling
  • Automatic high-beam
• Power tailgate
• Power sliding rear glass
• Proximity entry and push-button start
• Electronic parking brake
• 14-inch touchscreen infotainment system
• Wireless Apple CarPlay
• Wired Android Auto
• 12.3-inch digital instrument cluster
• 12-speaker JBL sound system
• ‘Premium’ upholstery
• 8-way power-adjustable front seats
• Heated and ventilated front seats
• Leather-accented steering wheel, shifter
• Tilt and telescopic steering column adjustment
• Dual-zone climate control
• Wireless phone charger
• 2 x front USB-A outlets
• 1 x front USB-C outlet
• 1 x rear USB-A outlet
• 1 x rear USB-C outlet

The Platinum adds:

• Black 20-inch alloy wheels
• LED tub lights
• Panoramic sunroof
• Rain-sensing wipers
• 10.9-inch head-up display
• Leather-accented upholstery
• 4-way power lumbar for front seats
• Massaging front seats
• Heated and ventilated outboard rear seats
• Power tilt and telescopic steering column adjustment
• Heated steering wheel

A 70mm tow ball is optional and enables the Tundra to tow a 4500kg braked trailer. There’s also a range of genuine accessories including a tonneau cover, load distribution hitch, and a cargo net.

To see how the Toyota Tundra lines up against the competition, check out our comparison tool

Is the Toyota Tundra safe?

The Toyota Tundra hasn’t been tested by ANCAP, though US testing of left-hand drive vehicles by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety saw the pickup receive the coveted Top Safety Pick+ award in 2025. It was the only full-size pickup to receive this award.

Standard safety equipment includes:

• Adaptive cruise control
• Autonomous emergency braking
  • Pedestrian detection
  • Daytime cyclist detection
• Blind-spot monitoring
• Lane-keep assist
• Lane Trace Assist (lane centring)
• Rear cross-traffic alert
• Surround-view camera
• Front and rear parking sensors
• Tyre pressure monitoring
• 8 x airbags

To see how the Toyota Tundra lines up against the competition, check out our comparison tool

How much does the Toyota Tundra cost to run?

The Toyota Tundra and Ford F-150 (and more recently the Chevrolet Silverado) are the only vehicles in this segment to offer a warranty longer than three years, as well as capped-price servicing. Letting the Toyota down, however, are extremely short six-month/10,000km service intervals.

To see how the Toyota Tundra lines up against the competition, check out our comparison tool

CarExpert’s Take on the Toyota Tundra

The Tundra struggles to find a unique selling point in this segment, beyond its brand’s extensive dealer network.

A hybrid twin-turbo V6 sounds terrific on paper, but in reality fuel consumption is no better than rivals without electrification.

Its interior isn’t as well-packaged as rivals, its four-wheel drive system isn’t as sophisticated, and it’s frankly overpriced.

You might think Toyota’s well-established reputation for reliability would make this a no-brainer over its Detroit rivals, but we’d remind you the Tundra hasn’t been immune to recalls. Sure, it hasn’t had the lousy rollout the F-150 has locally, but it was subject to a major recall in the US due to debris circulating through its engine.

Even mighty Toyota can occasionally suffer mechanical issues, then, though it’s worth noting there’s only been one recall for the Tundra locally and that was for moisture in its reversing lights.

The Tundra is a lovely thing to sit in and drive and it offers the capability of its key rivals, but at this price point it’s tough to recommend it.

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