The Toyota Land Cruiser has been a favorite off-road 4x4 vehicle for some 60 years. The Lexus LX 570 is a more luxurious version of the same vehicle. But there are significant differences, too, so I drove both of them up my Ramp Travel Index (RTI) ramp to see which one articulates better in a frame-twist off-road situation.
You can see a written version of this test with side-by-side pictures if you follow this link to my story on Autoblog: www.autoblog.com/2020/05/21/t...
Through its 60 years the Land Cruiser has morphed through numerous generations, surviving and thriving through the SUV segment's "mall wagon" phase and managing to stay true to itself despite the rise of crossovers. This 2020 Toyota Land Cruiser is a Heritage Edition model that celebrates that past while also making itself even more well-suited to overlanding, an off-road pastime that has always existed but only recently got a good publicist.
The 2020 Lexus LX 570 is built on the same 200-series Land Cruiser chassis, but the LX has a shorter history that only dates back to 1996 LX 450 that was based on the 80-series Land Cruiser. Back then, the LX wasn't very different. It had little more than cladding, a Lexus badge and a higher price. The amount of styling differentiation and luxury specialization has increased since then, and it's now gotten to the point that they some don'r realize that they are basically the same vehicle.
One big point of difference is their suspension that underpins them. They use the same layout and share most of their parts, but for a few significant differences. The Land Cruiser employs standard springs and shock absorbers, but it also has KDSS (Kinetic Dynamic Suspension System), which is set of hydraulically-linked stabilizer bars that automatically disconnect off-road.
The LX 570 has Adaptive Variable Suspension with 4-Wheel Height Control, which is totally different. This system consists of hydraulic cylinders where the shocks would go, and these can be lengthened or shortened to make significant height adjustments. But the damping valves so no reside in these struts even though they look like shock absorbers. Instead, their movements pump fluid back through the height control piping to remote-mounted damping valves mounted along the frame rails. The idea is to create superior ride comfort while retaining off-road capability and adding a height control function that can raise the vehicle more then 2 inches when the going gets tough.
Obviously, this suspension difference begs a question: Which suspension will articulate more and drive farther up my RTI ramp? Better performance here translates directly into better off-road capability in frame-twist situations.
The idea of an RTI ramp is simple. It creates an artificial but repeatable frame-twist situation that allows you to safely reach the point of maximum suspension flex and quantify that through a simple measurement. Numerical scores are based on a vehicle’s performance on a 20-degree ramp, an angle that was chosen some time ago and works well for stock vehicles.
Why am I doing this? I love this stuff. I'm a former suspension development engineer that spent most of my career developing off-road focused trucks and SUVs. Later, I somehow found my way into auto journalism, and for several years I created a popular photo feature called a Suspension Walkaround for Inside Line, a now-defunct offshoot of Edmunds.com (no relation). Today I have resumed writing these features under the name Suspension Deep Dive for Autoblog. I'm also doing video versions here on this channel.
But I'm also known for a series of RTI blog posts and Instagram shots featuring numerous off-road vehicles posing on this very RTI ramp. I didn't know where to buy such a ramp when I first got interested in doing this, so I designed one myself, bought all the metal, cut it to size, and had a friend of a friend weld it together. My previous employer was tired of it being in the way, so it's now with me at home, where I'm starting to re-build my database with new vehicles. I'll be keeping track of everything I measure and will be calling my database the Flex Index.
I never seemed to have the time, the equipment, or the confidence to get in front of the camera, but I got over that by hosting at least 80 professionally-produced videos over the last three years on the Edmunds.com You Tube channel. If you like this video, tell your friends, click subscribe, share links, give it a like and check out the other videos on my channel, which is simply called Dan Edmunds. And I take requests. I can't promise that I can get my hands on every new off-road oriented truck or SUV, but the odds are good. And the more views I get, the more horsepower I'll have when requesting off-road vehicles to examine.