What Doomed Bids on this Duramax-Swapped Land Cruiser?
While it’s high-mileage and far from stock, this Duramax-swapped Land Cruiser looks like a wicked rig!
Prices for classic Toyota rigs, including all flavors of the Pickup, 4Runner, and the Land Cruiser have been on the rise for years. So when they come up on auction sites, especially premium ones like Bring a Trailer, I always expect they’ll go for big bucks. And generally? I haven’t been caught off guard by too many bidding fests lately. Or at least that was the case until I decided to watch the auction of this 1994 Duramax-swapped Land Cruiser. It was bid to just under $30k, and that’s where it ground to a halt. Apparently, it never met its reserve.
To be clear, both the engine and the chassis had more than 200k on the clock, so it’s not like this is some Icon-style super build. But while the driver’s seat — somewhat inexplicably — hasn’t been recovered or replaced, everything else looks nice and tidy. Under the hood, there’s nothing that looks like a hack job, even to the eagle-eyed BaT commentors, and according to the seller, both the heat and the air conditioning work fine. Plus, it’s a stick shift, which is a proven value-adder to virtually any enthusiast vehicle.
From what I’ve seen in the past, folks looking for a Land Cruiser of this vintage aren’t terribly concerned about originality. I’ve seen plenty of heavily modified rigs command well upwards of 30k, and if you were interested in a Land Cruiser will an American oil-burner for a heart, this seems like a killer deal. Because when you start to explore the cost of doing a swap yourself, it’ll become clear that there’s virtually no way to do it on the cheap, even if you’re staying in the same family of brands.
So seeing this stall makes me wonder a few things. First, how close was this Land Cruiser to hitting reserve? And second, how much does the builder has into it? Finally, I’d like to know what the YotaTech crowd thinks something like this is worth. From the description, it sounds like it’s basically ready to go, even if the high mileage — not to mention the custom nature of the build — would warrant going over everything with a fine-tooth comb once it was parked in your garage. So what do you think? Hit me up and let me know!
Photos: Bring a Trailer