New Hilux builds on heritage
Despite a flood of Chinese product the best-selling vehicle in South Africa remains the Toyota Hilux. As it has been for decades.
Hilux serves as an effective barometer of economic activity in South Africa. From farmers to technical support crews, mining fleets, industrial logistics, and even an increasing number of urban buyers choosing double cabs as their family car, Hilux sales mirror South African economic sentiment.
The ninth-generation Hilux, launched in South Africa this month, is by far the most important vehicle introduction of the year. For Toyota, the burden of expectation is immense.
Hilux is enormously successful, but it increasingly needs to be more things to more people. Double cab versions of the new Hilux need to be more comfortable urban family vehicles, without sacrificing the all-terrain driving ability, loadability and durability that have built Hilux’ s reputation over decades across Southern Africa.
Much comfier cabin
Toyota ' s engineering and product development team knows that Hilux is unrivalled in the single cab bakkie market but is outsold by the Ford Ranger in the lucrative double cab market. The ninth-generation Hilux has been engineered to address this, featuring an advanced cabin architecture with many components and touchpoints similar to those of the Land Cruiser Prado.
Cabin comfort is the enduring challenge for engineers of double cab bakkies. The body-on-frame design limits floor depth and rear leg comfort. What Toyota ' s cabin design team has done is to modernise the Hilux where suitable, without sacrificing the touchpoint predictability that bakkie buyers really value, like lots of physical dials, buttons, and push controls, instead of screen functions and haptics.
An excellent example of Toyota balancing the need to modernise Hilux ' s cabin with an understanding of how South Africans use the bakkie is its selectable off-road control functions. These are on an easily reachable panel with four large buttons, flanked by a robust, easy-throw switch. Functions like the Hilux ' s rear diff-lock are simple push-button. On the Ford Ranger, the diff-lock is engaged as a secondlevel menu function on the central infotainment screen.
Legacy toughness carried over
The ninth-generation Hilux is not on an all-new platform, as many analysts imagined. There was an expectation that it would be built on a shortened version of the TNGA-F platform, used by the Land Cruiser 300 and Prado. New Hilux rides on an enhanced version of the eighth-generation Hilux platform.
The most challenging aspect of the new Hilux was retaining the bakkie ' s fabled durability, especially for farmers and commercial fleet operators.
These buyers need proven off-road driving ability and a Hilux that can be operated for many years under demanding conditions, running at close to its maximum load factor. But Toyota also knows that the lucrative double cab urban buyers, increasingly women who use a bakkie as the daily family vehicle, have very different needs.
With their size and weight, bakkies can be intimidating to drive in traffic or when having to fit into a narrow parking bay at a school event or at
the mall. That ' s one of the reasons why Toyota ' s engineers have upgraded the new Hilux from hydraulic to electric power steering. There ' s no hydraulic pressure lag when rapidly twirling the steering from lock to lock while parking. The electric power steering works brilliantly, making the new Hilux feel much easier to position at all speeds.
WORDS IN ACTION 16 JUNE 2026