Faster Toyota GR HiLux: boss delivers verdict on possible Raptor rival

If you’ve been waiting for a more powerful, high-performance version of the Toyota HiLux to battle the Ford Ranger Raptor, we have some bad news.

It’s not going to happen. At least not for a while…

The man in charge of Toyota’s GR performance division, Tomoya Takahashi, is currently visiting Australia and during a media round-table, Wheels asked about the prospect of a flagship Toyota HiLux GR to sit above the current HiLux GR Sport.

Just like AMG and BMW M, which have ‘sport’ sub brands that sit beneath faster ‘full fat’ performance models, the 165kW/550Nm HiLux GR Sport is positioned a rung below the more hardcore, 292kW/583Nm Ford Ranger Raptor.

4

2023 Toyota HiLux GR Sport

But while that might seem to leave room to add an even faster, more powerful version of the HiLux, Takahashi firmly rejected the idea.

“Maybe a GR special car? No,” he said. “Only GR Sports.”

For absolute clarity we asked again if a rival for the Ranger Raptor might come in the future but the response was a shaking head, along with “No”.

Pretty unequivocal, then, from the man who makes the key decisions — Takahashi is GR Company President — but there’s also no doubt that the Ranger Raptor currently gives Ford a key advantage here in Australia.

The Toyota HiLux and Ford Ranger are bitter rivals on the Aussie sales charts, often swapping places to be the nation’s best-selling vehicle. But while both dual-cab utes shift serious metal each month, the Raptor currently has the lucrative high-performance market all to itself.

4

Despite a lofty price tag of $90,440 Raptor sales are so strong that Ford is reluctant to share exactly how many it sells.

We do know more than 10,000 units of the first-generation Raptor found homes in Australia, while the second-gen ute had more than 5000 pre-sales before it even hit showrooms. Ford sells the Aussie-developed Raptor to key markets around the globe including the United Kingdom, South Africa and Thailand.

“Ford Australia is thrilled at the customer response to the current generation Ranger Raptor since its launch in 2022,” a Ford spokesperson told Wheels.

4

GAZOO Racing Company President Tomoya Takahashi

Popularity of the Ranger Raptor speaks for itself, and we are proud of how it has pushed new frontiers in terms of performance in the mid-size ute segment.

The Ranger Raptor is not only a local success story, being engineered and designed by Australians for Australians, but a global one as well being sold on every continent bar Antarctica.”

The good news is that while a full-blown GR version of the HiLux seems off the cards, Takahashi did say Toyota’s fleet of SUVs are ripe to receive the go-fast treatment.