Toyota 4Runner 40th Anniversary Special Edition Debuts

It won’t be this clean on pavement or dirt. Click to Enlarge

The Toyota 4Runner will reach the 40-year mark with the 2023 model year. To cash in, Toyota is offering a 4WD-only 2023 4Runner 40th Anniversary Special Edition.

Toyota will make 4,040 of these special editions available for the US market. Over the past four decades, 4Runner has tallied more than 4 million cumulative sales, so the latest marketing push is only incremental revenue.

The 2023 Toyota 4Runner 40th Anniversary Special Edition is based on the SR5 Premium grade and will be available in three colors: White, Midnight Black Metallic and Barcelona Red Metallic. It has bronze-colored 17-inch alloy wheels, a body-color-matching heritage grille and a bronze-colored 40th Anniversary exterior tailgate badge. In short, all the “usual” special edition tweaks.

The most garish is the heritage graphics package. In a passing to those early 4Runner racers, the 4Runner 40th Anniversary Edition has “retro-inspired” yellow/orange/red body graphics. The anniversary theme continues inside, with exclusive badging on the center console and a bronze-colored cross-stitch shift knob, bronze-colored seat stitching, 40th Anniversary floormats and a 40th Anniversary logo on the black SofTex-trimmed seats.

Toyota notes: When the first 4Runner arrived, “Star Wars: Return of the Jedi” was the top-grossing movie in America, and “Every Breath You Take” by the Police had ended the year at #1 on the Billboard 100. (That was then “Jedi” the third Star Wars movie, not “Episode Six.”)