Retro Styling Kit Appears for the Toyota Tacoma

If you’ve always wanted your last-gen Toyota Tacoma to look like a Land Cruiser from the 1980s, a company based in Japan has just the solution for you.

An outfit called Flex has apparently been slinging these types of conversions for some spell but is now expanding its presence into America through a location in San Diego. The new kit is made solely for the American market, which makes sense since the Tacoma can be in short supply in Japan compared to Jacksonville. The retro refit gifts the truck with round headlights and a grille sure to remind gearheads of the 60-Series Land Cruiser. Steel bumpers are a good upgrade over stock units, no matter what you think of the rest of this styling mashup, and the company makes specific mention of a ‘straight line hood design’ though there’s no talk of new fenders or the like.

It seems the Flex team will hoover your bank account for at least $52,800 for one of these creations, though that is a sum that includes the price of a second-hand Tacoma. Given the prices those things tend to command, especially in the SoCal market, it’s not entirely clear how much the kit itself costs. Some of the other wares described on the Flex site suggest a person can bring their own rig for conversion, so customers who want to renovate their own Taco may be able to do just that. 

Arguments have raged for eons about the effectiveness of these types of conversions in which an older car’s visage is pasted onto a modern machine. Those ’49 Ford faces on an MN12 Thunderbird are jarring to this author’s eye, as are the pre-squarebody Chevy Blazer fronts attached to modern Tahoe SUVs. Sometimes the old-school rectilinear lines don’t flow with contemporary cues. This is a blend that seems to work better than most, no doubt in partial thanks to Toyota’s glacial-like design cycles. 

Figure on a two- to five-month build time, which is one heckuva range estimate. If you’re in the San Diego area early next year and spot one of these things prowling the street, be sure to drop us a line.

[Image: Flex]

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