Land Cruiser gets stuck in mud – 2021 Motoring Newsmaker No 20

Two-thousand-and-twenty-one was an interesting year for the South African motoring landscape.

Some things changed, like an acceleration towards greener cars, while others stayed the same like Toyota topping the monthly sales charts.

In this series of 2021 Motoring Newsmakers, The Citizen looks back at the top 20 most popular online stories of the year. The series is dominated by South Africa’s most popular body style, bakkies, while the Toyota Land Cruiser 300 was by far the most viewed single model on our website. Other local favourites in the form of hot hatches, fuel efficient hatchbacks, big, mean SUVs, compact SUVs, Mercedes-AMGs and BMW M cars also drew their fair share of attention.

There was lots of action around the Land Cruiser 300’s highly-anticipated debut in the second half of the year. Even before its arrival, the run out of the Land Cruiser 200 had the local market in a frenzy. There was a mad dash and massive pre-owned market price hike for the last Toyota Land Cruiser 200s as the L300 would ditch the 4.5-litre V8 engine.

The impressive Land Cruiser 300‘s arrival then sparked another frenzy as demand went through the roof for the new 3.3-litre diesel and 3.5 V6 petrol engines. Orders came flying in as waiting lists got longer and longer. Fortunately, The Citizen was privileged enough to get our hands on a few LC300s as scarce as they are. First on an epic launch drive around the West Coast.

Then Road Test Editor Mark Jones took both Land Cruiser engine derivates for high-performance testing to record some impressive data against the clock. But it wasn’t all plain sailing, as Mark found out the hard way during an early morning visit to the Gerotek testing facility.

Without further ado, here is the first instalment of our series of most popular motoring stories for the year:

2021 MOTORING NEWSMAKER NO 20: How to get a Toyota Land Cruiser 300 GR-S stuck in the mud

For more information on the Toyota Land Cruiser 300, click here.