The Toyota UUV Is What Happened When a Sienna Van and a Tacoma Made a Child

It sounds like such a marketing cliché, we know. But it’s true, and you have to look no farther than the UUV project to see it.

The UUV is a 2015 one-off concept that looks like the somewhat odd-looking lovechild of a Toyota Sienna and a Toyota Tacoma. It’s like a jacked-up van, with an aggressive stance that makes you think this is what the family-friendly Sienna would look like if it suddenly decided to start weightlifting and take steroids to cheat its way to better muscle definition.

The UUV, in short, is beefy, impressive, and strange. The name stands for Ultimate Utility Vehicle and, while it never made it into production (Toyota never had any plans in this direction), it did get plenty of use.

The UUV was one of the vehicles Toyota brought to the 2015 Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) show. All the builds shown at SEMA are a mixture of marketing and deep love of all things automotive, and the UUV was no different. Sure, jokes were made right after the introduction (the internet can be a cruel place sometime, especially for “kids” that stand out, one way or another), and puns were wasted by the dozens. But the consensus was that Toyota had a winner on its hands.

The UUV's goal was double: to show what could be achieved in terms of customization and build the perfect car for a specific purpose. This jacked-up van had a very good purpose, too, since it had been build to aid on the North American leg of the Ever-Better Expedition. That was a five-continent, yearlong project devised by Toyota President Akio Toyoda, aimed to help Toyota build better cars based on the vehicles' real-life uses.

You can see a trailer for the North American leg of the tour below, including the U.S., Canada, and Alaska. The UUV doesn’t make an appearance with the nine vehicles, but that’s because it served as a command center for Toyota engineers monitoring data from the other nine cars. As such, the UUV was, at the time, the most technologically advanced vehicle Toyota had ever built.

In fact, that’s why the Sienna had been chosen as the donor for the body: Toyota needed a sizable vehicle that could fit an entire team of engineers and all their equipment, but one tough enough to drive wherever they were going. The 4x4 platform from a Tacoma served the latter purpose just fine.

Equipment inside included a TracVision mobile satellite television receiver, Wi-Fi, internet access, multiple USB ports, 17-inch monitor, 60-inch Sony LED TV, 2,500-watt JBL audio system, and a Flir M-324xp night vision camera system with high-definition recording capability. Engineers had captain’s chairs with laptop tray tables in the back, where they would sit recording and monitoring data—and reporting back to HQ via Skype if the nine vehicles encountered any issues.

Both the body and the platform were reinforced before being fused together. The UUV received a four-inch (101-mm) lift with an Engaged four-link long-travel suspension, and was fit with 33×22 Nitto Mud Grappler tires mounted on 22×12-inch Monster Energy 539B off-road wheels. It was also equipped with overhead lights and a winch. Because the wheels prevented the Sienna doors from sliding back as they used to, they were modified to slide out. The front doors were redesigned in suicide-style, offering easy access inside.

Because the UUV was an exercise in engineering, the interior was made to look stock Sienna. That is to say, the levers and buttons looked exactly like OEM equipment, but in reality, they were replicas that controlled the Tacoma pickup underneath. A lovely, geeky touch if we ever saw one.

The gallery offers a closer look at the Toyota UUV, this one-off that made such big waves back in 2015. Batman himself would probably love to call it his command center.