Toyota Hilux Surf - A Brief History, Ideal Engines

The Hilux Surf line of vehicles made by Toyota is predominantly classed as off road transportation. First introduced in 1984 into Toyota's line up, they decided to not build the vehicle from the ground up as an entirely new model but rather took an existing model, the Hilux, and made modifications to it.

First generation of the model produced from 1984-1989

This first incarnation of the model was mechanically identical to the Toyota Hilux pickup. Toyota simply added a removable fibreglass top to it to change it into a Hilux Surf. All models had two doors and were identical from the dashboard forward to the Hilux. Almost all of the changes to make it a Hilux Surf were done to the rear half of the vehicle. Rear springs were downgraded from the Hilux pickup model and contained one less leaf. This resulted in problems later as with the addition of rear seats and the fibreglass top the rear leafs tended to sag over time.