I recently took the T100 and 4Runner out for a road trip through southern Colorado. The trip was a combination of highway driving and unimproved roads and with myself in the T100 and my SO in the 4Runner, and it was a good chance to see them side by side. On the highway the 4Runner showed better gas mileage than I expected, 11.3 vs 12.6 gallons for the T100 over just about 240 miles. With the same engine between them, the difference has to be down to weight and the manual transmission. While that impressed, washboard roads early on did uncover a problem with the 4runner:

With over 208k miles on it, the original shocks were still in service. The passenger rear shock ended up failing at the top bolt due to metal fatigue. It was an easy fix once the game of “what’s that noise???” played out.

After that excitement we took the million dollar highway down to Durango, then back up to Silverton where we picked up the road to Animas Forks on our way to Engineer pass. While the road wasn’t particularly challenging, the views were incredible.

We continued on to Wheeler geologic area, a site with eeie volcanic ash hoodoos in the middle of nowhere Colorado. The road to it was 16 miles of loose rocks and confirmed that the T100 ride is miserable. What the 4runner could do at 15mph was a pain at 10 in the truck.

On the way out of Wheeler we hit a surprise section of forest road marked “damaged”, which made for the roughest roads on the trip. In hindsight, I can’t believe the road was ever not damaged to begin with.

All in all everything worked as expected and I’ll moving forward with selling the truck. It’ll be hard to let it go, the bench seat and extra width make it more comfortable on the highway than the 4Runner, but just about everywhere else the 4Runner comes out ahead.