The Land Cruiser is Toyota’s longest-running nameplate. It’s been making them since 1951, and it’s still at it. The FJ Company has built its business around resto-modding some of those earlier examples. But this one is from another time – different from those early days, and certainly different from the model we know today.
It’s a 1986 FJ62 commissioned by a customer in Austin – home of the South by Southwest festival, the Circuit of the Americas, and the Texas state legislature. And as you can see, the vintage SUV is thoroughly Eighties, through and through.
Toyota produced the J60 generation of Land Cruisers throughout the 1980s, and kept building them in Venezuela through 1992. Believe it or not, though, that didn’t make it the longest-running version of the model line.
The iconic J40 was produced for over two decades. The last generation ran for nearly as long. And the current model has been in production since 2007, and is showing no sign of slowing down anytime soon.
This vehicle was originally red and upholstered with a rather tired-looking tartan cloth seats. The FJ Company stripped it down its bare metal and rebuilt it from the ground up, with an Old Man Emu suspension, hand-stitched vinyl (who needs leather?), a modern audio system, and the same rough-and-tumble, go-anywhere ruggedness for which the Land Cruiser and the FJ Company are known.
They topped it all off in an olive green with suitably retro side graphics. And the finished product looks like something Marty McFly might have longed for, if he wasn’t a) more into pickups and b) had the money to make a machine like this happen.