The Toyota Land Cruiser 70 Series is an automotive oddity, in continuous production since 1984 with a string of updates spread across the decades.
Its most recent facelift brought back the iconic round headlights, a welcome bit of nostalgia, but it also handed the Japanese market something stranger: body-colored covers where the taillights ought to be.
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So why did Toyota commit to a design that hides its own rear lamps?
Blame the Rulebook
The answer sits in local safety and homologation rules across markets like Japan and Europe.
Those regulations require that the rear combination lamps are unobstructed when the truck is viewed from certain side angles, and when the rear door hatch is open.
The catch is the spare.
Because the Land Cruiser hangs its full-sized spare tire on the rear swing door, that tire blocks the high-mounted pillar lights from certain angles.
Rather than redesign the sheet metal, Toyota dropped the working lights down to the rear bumper.
In some places, like Australia, those lower units run alongside functional upper taillights. Buyers in Japan and other Asian markets get the body-colored louvered dummy panels instead.
While the Japanese Land Cruiser 70 Series only got the dummy units in late 2023, this design workaround has a long history within the Land Cruiser family.
Bumper-mounted primary lighting appeared on select export variants such as the European-spec LJ70s from the late 1980s.
