Toyota has traveled to the SEMA show to unveil a brand new concept dubbed Tundrasine. As its name implies, the one-off is a Tundra pickup truck that has been painstakingly transformed into a luxurious limousine at the company’s San Antonio, Texas, assembly plant.
Pushing the term “full size” to the extreme, Toyota has added more than 90 inches of sheet metal to the Tundra Crew Cab’s wheelbase. As a result, the Tundrasine stretches over 26 feet from bumper to bumper, and it’s possible to park a long-wheelbase Mercedes-Benz S-Class between the concept’s axles. Clearly, Las Vegas was the ideal town in which to premiere the Tundrasine.
Inside, the outlandish Tundrasine stands out as the most luxurious truck Toyota has ever built. Accessed via one of eight doors, the cabin eschews the traditional sofa-like seat that’s usually found in limousines and instead adopts posh captain’s chairs for the second and third rows of seats, while the fourth row appears to retain the stock model’s bench seat. The nine occupants travel in a spacious, well-lit atmosphere whose design is inspired by the world of private jets. Highlights include brown leather upholstery with beige contrast stitching, airplane-style tablets built into the armrests, and a small forest’s worth of real wood trim on the door panels — all eight of them — and the dashboard.
Power for the nearly 8,000-pound truck is provided by a stock, 5.7-liter V8 engine that makes 381 horsepower and 401 pound-feet of torque. A six-speed automatic gearbox sends power to all four wheels, but what effect the extra sheet metal has on performance and gas mileage is anyone’s guess at this point. The donor Tundra returns 13 mpg in the city and 17 mpg on the highway.
It goes without saying that the Toyota Tundrasine is a one-off model designed for the SEMA show, not a preview of an upcoming addition to the car maker’s lineup. However, Toyota hasn’t revealed if it’s open to the idea of building a limited number of Tundra-based limousines for livery services.
