2024 Toyota Tacoma Review: Dirt-Road Tested With a Whole Family of Farm Dogs

The vibes of a dog riding in a truck are immaculate. Driving a 2024 Toyota Tacoma TRD Off-Road around our back fields with a bed full of Australian shepherds and golden retrievers was a soul-charging experience that I’m already cherishing as a memory. But aesthetics aside, for everyday get-around duties, I’m sorry to report that a pickup truck (even one with a full-sized back seat) is suboptimal for dog-hauling duty in a few major ways.

The Tacoma itself left me with mixed impressions. It drives well; the ride strikes a nice balance between daily drivable comfort and the weighty feeling of soft suspension on a stiff frame that gives pickup trucks their nebulous charm. The turbocharged four-banger engine sounds good and is sufficiently powerful, even with a few thousand pounds being pulled by the trailer hitch. Fuel economy on these things hasn’t improved much since the ’90s, but braking is good and the seats are comfy—this wouldn’t be a miserable machine to roll around in every day.

My first frustrations were matters of taste. The exterior design is pretty cool, but the new Taco’s cockpit comes off like a kid’s toy. It’s like a caricature of toughness. There’s cheesy checker-plate patterns on plastic, an A-pillar grab handle that’s more decorative than functional, and simulated machine screws. Almost every square inch of the cockpit has an in-your-face tactical design. And yet as soon as you touch something, it feels dinkier than the G.I. Joe vehicles I had as a kid.

The volume knob, while well-positioned in the middle of the dash, fell off in my hand as I was trying to turn the music down. One of the seat-position adjuster controls came off when my wife went to scooch her seat forward. The plastic around the USB input was already covered in scratches from people plugging in their phones. Between those observations and Toyota’s recent truck-manufacturing missteps, the Tacoma is in serious danger of losing its sterling reputation as a universally trustworthy mid-sized pickup. But today, we’re going to focus on its talents as an animal shuttle.

Test Dogs

Our 45-pound Aus shep/retriever mutt Bramble did most of the sniffing on this one, but we also roped in her parents and a bunch of siblings, some she hadn’t seen in years, for some fluffy photos here.

Climbing In and Out

You won’t be surprised to learn that the Tacoma TRD Off-Road’s back seat is pretty high off the ground. The rear door is also on the small side. Our springy Shepherd mutts were able to vault themselves up, but the family’s aging pure goldens were not having it. Animals with modest athletic abilities will be tough to load in. Prepare to make a big lift if you need to take an older large dog somewhere in a truck like this!

Our pups could jump up onto the tailgate more easily. In fact, Bramble made one particularly heroic leap straight over the closed tailgate (hopping, like, five vertical feet!) into the bed in pursuit of an uncooked hot dog somebody was holding near the cab. But few breeds have ups like that.

That said, you will only catch me hauling dogs in a truck bed off-road at farm pace. As long as your dogs can be trusted not to hop out and take off after deer, tootling around fields and forests with them in an open cargo area is fine. But once you get onto the road and beyond around 30 mph, it’s really not smart or safe to have an unrestrained animal out in the wind. In fact, there are laws about this in some states. Dogs could get yeeted into the road if you have a fender bender or even just stop short. Even on an uneventful ride, road refuse could get kicked up and get in their eyes or face. All that to say, I was happy to get some cute pictures of our dogs in the bed on our property, but I don’t really consider that part of the vehicle’s dog-friendliness equation. Using a kennel is a different story which we’ll circle back to in a few paragraphs.

Functional Dimensions

These dimensions are measured by hand representing a practical figure, not an absolute max or minimum.

• Ground to rear footwell: 24″

• Ground to rear seat: 37″

• Ground to cargo area: 35″

• Seat bottom to window sill: 14.5″

Interior Materials and Layout

The Double Cab (four-door) Tacoma’s rear seat is tiny. I can’t even imagine how cramped it is in the XtraCab (extended cab) versions—the GR86 sports car‘s rear seat might even be more generous than that one. But the general layout is your standard two seats up front bisected by a huge center console with a bench in the back.

I already complained about the scratch-susceptibility of the interior plastics, but the TRD Off-Road seats are excellent in both look and feel. They don’t have the TRD Pro’s fancy supplemental suspension system or inflators, but they’re comfy and robust-feeling. I love that Toyota still puts a big open cavity between the lower spokes of its steering wheels, too—makes it comfortable to cruise with one hand resting right at the bottom.

Window Access and Air Flow

The new Tacoma does not have the epic breeziness of the 4Runner or old Tundra with their full-width roll-down rear windows, but it does have an optional rear slider that can be power-opened from the driver’s seat. Many medium to large-sized dogs will be able to stick their snouts out of it easily.

As for the side windows, animal access is almost too good. Due to the tall height of the rear seats and the relatively low sill of the rear windows, our dogs found it extra tempting to try and jump right out. If your dogs aren’t buckled in, you’ll definitely need to be careful about how much you roll the rear windows down for them.

Cruising at 40 mph with the front two windows and one rear window down, I recorded an average ambient noise level of 75.1 decibels. I haven’t done enough of this testing yet to deeply contextualize that, but anecdotally, it’s not too bad—about the same volume as running a vacuum cleaner, apparently.

Driving With the Dog—Animal Comfort on the Road

Bramble prefers vehicles that are low and smooth. The height of the Tacoma and its slightly teetering nature around turns had her working pretty hard surfing on the back seat to stay upright. She certainly wasn’t miserable—she almost never is—and ultimately was able to snooze in her hammock secured to the headrests on a long trip just fine.

Pack Hauling—Multiple Dogs On Board

We did have fun giving our entire family’s family of pets a little hay ride in the bed, but putting three dogs in the cab was pretty chaotic. Though the squared-off rear window of a four-door pickup does make for ample rear headroom, the back seats are pretty close to the fronts, and medium to large dogs don’t have a lot of room to turn around once the get on top of each other.

Two medium-sized dogs could ride on the rear bench easily enough. We had a lot of fur flying around with one medium and two larges back there, though.

Carrying Kennels

A kennel or crate is a great way to transport an animal in any vehicle it’ll fit, even though not all animals are crazy about it. Putting a dog in a kennel that’s secured in a truck bed is common practice in the hunting world, and can indeed be perfectly safe as long as we’re talking about a high-quality kennel that’s tied down securely.

You still need to consider wind and weather when you plan your route and speed—you don’t want to have an animal in a box in harsh conditions for hours and hours on end. But the Tacoma’s bed has plenty of tie-down rings that would give you many options for kennel clamping.

It might be possible to fit a smaller kennel inside the Double Cab’s rear seat area, but it’d be tough and tight.

Toyota Tacoma Dog-Friendliness Verdict

The Tacoma’s a pretty cool-looking truck from the right angles, and it looks even better with a whole pack of pooches wagging their tails in the cargo bed. I enjoyed some aspects of driving it but was forced to realize that a pickup is surprisingly inconvenient for general daily dog-driving duties. If you’ve got a gun dog that rides in a mounted kennel in the bed, that’s one thing. But for my little fluffy princess who gets buckled into the back seat, it was kind of a pain to coax her into leaping for the high rear seat and keep her from trying to hop out of the low rear windows at passing squirrels.

If you have to carry a dog and more than two people, or any soft cargo you don’t want the animal to eat (is anybody carrying takeout food or groceries in their truck bed?) a mid-sized truck’s layout is a lot less than ideal.

But Bramble sure did love sticking her snout out that little back-facing window while we cruised around the Hudson Valley’s farm country.

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Dogs and a Tacoma: Extra Gallery