Yahoo Autos Toyota has designed a lunar rover that looks like a Toyota Land Cruiser, but on the moon
Toyotas are known for being some best off-road vehicles ever built, but what if you need to go way off-road? No, even further. We're talking about so far off-road that you're not even on the planet anymore. That's what designers at Toyota were envisioning when they came up with the Toyota Baby Lunar Rover.
Toyota recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of Calty, their Southern California design studio that has put the sheetmetal on everything from the 1978 Celica to the 2024 Tacoma. Along the way, there have been some real stunners like the original Lexus SC300/400 and the Lexus LC. Toyota was the first carmaker to establish a studio in the epicenter of American car culture, and to honor half a century of that they're looking to the future with an electric 4x4 that will go off-world.
As fantastical as that sounds, there is precedent for this. In 2020 Toyota announced they were developing a moon rover called the Lunar Cruiser in partnership with JAXA, Japan's equivalent of NASA. Like that vehicle, the Baby Lunar Cruiser takes a few heritage cues from the FJ40 Land Cruiser. That includes wraparound glass at the rear corners and the wide grille with the classic Helvetica "TOYOTA" logo in front. In the BLC's case, the grille doubles as housing for cameras and radar and lidar sensors.
