Those Aren’t Taillights: The Strange Toyota Land Cruiser 70 Detail Explained

There’s something almost funny about the Toyota Land Cruiser 70 Series. It has survived for more than four decades, crossed countless borders, and built a reputation for going almost anywhere. Yet one of its strangest features has nothing to do with off-road ability.

Look closely at some versions and you’ll find what appear to be taillights on the rear pillars. They aren’t actually lights.

Toyota has kept the 70 Series alive since 1984, giving it a steady stream of updates without changing the basic recipe. The latest facelift even brought back the classic round headlights. At the rear, though, Toyota took a much less obvious approach. Japanese-market trucks use body-colored panels where the upper taillights normally sit, while the working lights live down in the bumper.

There’s a good reason for that odd-looking setup. Regulations in markets such as Japan and Europe require rear lights to remain visible from specific angles. They also need to stay visible when the rear door is open.

That creates a problem for the 70 Series because Toyota mounts a full-size spare tire on the rear swing door. From certain angles, the tire can hide the lights mounted high on the body. Instead of redesigning the rear of a vehicle that has used basically the same body for decades, Toyota moved the main lighting down to the bumper.

The solution varies between markets. In Australia, for example, the Land Cruiser can have working lights in both locations. Japanese and some other Asian-market versions get the lower functional lights along with the rather convincing-looking blank panels higher up.

Interestingly, Toyota has dealt with this issue before. Some export versions of the Land Cruiser 70 from the late 1980s already placed the brake lights and indicators in the bumper. The upper sections then served other lighting or reflector functions.

The global body design also explains why owners have found an easy way to reverse the Japanese setup. Toyota uses the same basic body stampings across different markets, so the mounting points for proper upper taillights remain hidden behind those blank panels.

A Thai custom shop recently showed how simple the conversion can be. The biggest job involves the wiring. Japanese-market trucks don’t have an active circuit running to the upper mounting points, so installers need to connect new wires from the bumper area and route them up into the rear quarter panels.

Once the wiring reaches the top, the conversion gets much easier. Remove the blank panels, connect genuine taillight assemblies from another market, and bolt everything into place, and the Land Cruiser gets the rear lighting arrangement many owners expected it to have from the start.

The 70 Series also isn’t alone in using this trick. Suzuki used similar bumper-mounted lighting on several generations of the Jimny, Vitara, and Grand Vitara. Mitsubishi, Nissan, and Isuzu used related solutions on models such as the Pajero, Patrol, and Trooper. 

So those fake-looking taillights on the Land Cruiser 70 aren’t a strange styling experiment. They’re Toyota’s way of keeping a decades-old design alive while satisfying modern safety rules.