1974 Toyota Land Cruiser

The FJ40 version of the heavy duty Toyota Land Cruiser was produced, almost unchanged, from 1960 through 1984, which is incredible longevity for a single generation of vehicle. If you got driven home from the hospital as an infant in one during the Kennedy administration, you could have bought one that looked just like it when you graduated college while Reagan was president.

Oh, sure, the new one would have had front disc brakes, a factory roll bar, the vent windows would have been deleted, and the grille/headlight bezel would have been squarer, but it would have been essentially identical.

This one's been resto-modded heavily enough that it's hard to be certain of the exact model year, but the rear lift gate, rather than a pair of full-height barn doors, combined with the presence of MVSS '68 compliant side marker lights, makes me guess it's somewhere between '69 and '74. (That instrument panel, for instance, is completely aftermarket.)

For 1974, the FJ40 would have had Toyota's 3.9L F engine under the hood, a torquey undersquare lump of a pushrod inline six with a 7.8:1 compression ratio that allowed it to run on garbage gasoline from whatever shady seller you stumbled across while roaming around the outback. It made 138 SAE net horsepower and grunted out 215 lb/ft of torque at only 2200 RPM.

This Freeborn Red example was photographed in April of 2025 using an Olympus PEN E-P5 and an M. Zuiko Digital 12-45mm f/4 PRO zoom lens.