A 1994 Toyota Land Cruiser recently sold on Bring a Trailer (BaT) for $136,000. And I don’t know what to do with myself anymore.
I got my first FZJ80, a 1997 model year, in 2012 for $7,500. It had 130,000 miles on the odometer and was in good shape. It didn’t have lockers but it had damn near everything else.
Photo: BaT
I slung an ARB bumper off the front, backed by a WARN M8 winch, bolted up some Goodyear Wrangler tires, and “the Blunderbuss,” as I called it, became my trusty overlanding steed for many years.
I eventually sold it for $14,000 a couple years later. And I thought that was the deal of the century.
But this week brought something I had once considered quite unfathomable to existence: an FZJ80 cracking the $100,000 mark … by an extra 36%.
Photo: BaT
The example in question closed on BaT on June 13, 2021 for a whopping $136,000. And I feel sort of helpless.
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Sure, it’s triple locked from the factory. It’s powered by the enviable 24-valve 1FZ-FE 4.5-liter inline six. It has the cool “TOYOTA” script grille … and — oh yeah — only 1,000 miles on the clock. So, I kind of get it. Only kind of, though.
The main charm of the 80 Series is its ability to be a virtually unstoppable workhorse — even with 500,000 miles on the clock, these things just. keep. going. You can toss them into rivers, bounce them off rocks, neglect them for decades, and they just keep plodding along like a cheery Labrador.
Photo: BaT
I wager, though, you can’t do that with this one. With a scant thousand miles, you dare not make it an adventure-mobile, as so many 80 Series have become. And daily driving a $136,000 truck that looks like a $20,000 truck seems silly to me.
So what’s the point? Just to have it, I guess.
Kudos to the seller. You should have driven the thing more. Honestly, though, you made a brilliant choice by not driving it. My hat is off to you.
Header image: Bring a Trailer
Written by Nick Jaynes. You can find Nick on Twitter at @nickjaynes and on Instagram @nickjaynes
