Driving The Life-Size Tonka Toyota 4Runner

“Man, that’s a long way down,” I think, as my left foot dangles above the ground at an elevation of about two and a half feet, but which looked like 10 stories from my eyes’ point of view. There is no stepping out of the new, one-off Tonka Toyota 4Runner. You look. You pray. You breathe. Then you leap.

Getting in isn’t much easier, I’d discovered about 30 minutes prior. But getting in is exactly what I had come to do. Tonka had brought some of its real-life toys and asked us to come play in the dirt. It was childhood dream come to life. I’d find my way into that driver’s seat if I had to use ropes and a pulley.

The toys—very, very pricey toys—also include a yellow Tonka Ford F-250 and a red Tonka Tundra “fire truck,” the latter featuring dozens of twinkling LED strobes, a fire truck siren, and a bed-mounted T-shirt cannon.  Both of those big boys wear mud flaps the size of card tables, and each has made many appearances at off-road motorsports events around the country to help promote Tonka’s legendary brand. But the world debut of the Tonka 4Runner is what prompted us to leave our desks and head to Tonka Motorsports driver Myan Spaccarelli’s compound in Simi Valley, California.

SUVs may dominate the mall parking decks of America, but this Tonka Toyota is anything but anonymous. Narrower and shorter in length than the burly full-size pickups, the Tonka 4Runner looks particularly badass perched up on its 10-inch lift kit, wearing a web of Bulletproof-designed welded bumpers, roof racks, and bodyside ladders, each of which are veritable works of art. The Tonka 4Runner’s massive Mickey Thompson 38x15-inch Baja MTZ tires are set on a wide chassis, placing most of the tread far outside the fenders of the matte-wrapped body. Ultra Motorsports Type 250 Colossus wheels are painted—what else?—Tonka Yellow and measure a huge 20 inches in diameter and a full foot wide, each emblazoned with the Tonka name painted in a font so large it can be read from a block away.

The vast space between the tires and the body provide for clear viewing of the King 8” x 2.5” and 10” x 2.5” coil-overs and shocks, as well as various Bulletproof suspension pieces (it helps that they’re more or less chest-level). With its plethora of Rigid Industries LED light bars, you could park the Tonka 4Runner on a peninsula and it could double as a lighthouse.

Inside, the seats have been reupholstered by Roadwire leather interiors and a zillion-watt sound system was installed, the better with which to blast music out the back as one tosses trinkets to the kiddies (and adults) that invariably swarm the vehicle wherever it’s parked—as certain a fate for the 4Runner as it has been for its brethren.

The cherry on top—literally—is the Tonka 4Runner’s roof-mounted tent, which provides cozy lodging for two safely above ground, should your chosen parking spot happens to be nowhere near your own bed nor a comfy Sheraton. Access to said tent is granted via a ladder that drops from the passenger side, or for hardier folk, the aforementioned lattice of bars mounted to the D-pillar.

The 4Runner’s 3.5-liter V-6 engine was the only thing left intact, and as one might expect, this Tonkafied Toyota isn’t exactly fast, and it lists like a dinghy in a hurricane around corners. But with its short wheelbase, it feels nimble as a velociraptor compared to its five-ton siblings, which we also got to drive for a few miles apiece in the off-road paradise that is the Big Sky Movie Ranch just a stone’s throw from Spaccarelli’s compound.

In all three trucks, we feel absolutely indomitable. Bumps from below tell us that we’re running over stuff; we just can’t tell what. Not that it matters; it’s not like anything can stop us. While we were told to go easy on the 4Runner, as some final tuning had yet to be done on the front suspension, we get the feeling nonetheless that these trucks could simply trounce everything in their way, as if driven by the hand of a 50-foot-tall five-year-old. It’s exactly as we imagined it would feel when we were five years old, playing with Tonka toys in the sand box. The only thing we didn’t expect was how comfortable we’d be in the custom leather seats.

While we didn’t get to drive the 4Runner far on-road, it will by no means be a trailer queen, says Kathy Hawk, Vice President of Marketing for Funrise Toy Corp, which licenses the Tonka brand. Like the Tonka pickups, the 4Runner will actually be driven to many of the places where Tonka regularly has “activations,” which at this point are centered around the Lucas Oil Off-Road Racing Series, where incidentally, Tonka enters vehicles in several of the racing classes.

Indeed, driving them on public roads sounds like one of the best perks of Hawk’s job. “I love driving them on the street,” said Hawk. “I don’t need an excuse to drive them. You get a lot of looks. You see people sticking their cameras out, trying to take pictures. We have handouts and stickers and bracelets in the truck, so if we see a bunch of kids and they’re ooh-ing and ahh-ing we’ll pull over and let them take a look and create this experience for them. It’s just a great time.”

The point of these trucks, of course, is to promote Tonka, said Hawk. “I just think people forgot about [Tonka] because there wasn’t any marketing going on so we’ve want to get the brand in front of people’s faces, and I think we’ve done that with these trucks.

“We as Funrise Toys, we are ‘basic play,’” she said. “We create toys, so our biggest competition is iPads and video games and so forth. I think that we’re aligned with parents in wanting to get their kids outside. Going outside and getting dirty: that’s what we’re about.”