The 2024 Toyota Tacoma’s Chief Engineer Explains Why The Truck Needed A Hideous Air Dam To Fix The Awful Seating Position

You’ve all seen it. That gigantic black air dam jutting from the front fascia of the all-new 2024 Toyota Tacoma. The thing has to be at least six inches tall, and it totally ruins the look of an otherwise significantly improved frontal design.

I spoke with the new Toyota Tacoma’s chief engineer, Sheldon Brown, and asked about why this was needed. He openly admitted that he is “not a fan,” but that it was necessary for a number of reasons, one having to do with Toyota making improving the old truck’s oft-maligned seating position a “top priority.” Here, allow me (and him) to explain. I have the full interview in this video below:

I’ll be the first to admit that, when the 2024 Toyota Tacoma debuted, I couldn’t get past this debut photo taken by our Mercedes Streeter without adding an editor’s note:

I’m not the only one who thought this, as commenter Spectre6000 wrote:

I’m 100% with DT on the chin dam. Holy afterthought, Batman! It’s like someone grabbed a sheet of plastic out of a bin and stapled it on for testing, then never gave it another thought!

Here’s another comment from MH7:

I must be one of the few people who liked the design of the current Tacoma-a big appeal was that it didn’t have an ankle scraping air dam or needlessly complicated design, it just looked like a simple effective truck.

And here are perhaps the harshest two comments:

Yikes — “hideous” and “cow catcher”!

You may think that the Toyota Tacoma’s Chief Engineer, Sheldon Brown, would defend the air dam on his product, but actually, while he did back up the decisions that went into including it on the truck, he readily admitted: “I’m not a fan.”

Still, the air dam is there for a good reason, including Toyota’s focus on improving the outgoing truck’s awkward seating position — a problem described in the GoldSteading Overland YouTube video above.

“We wanted to address some of the foibles of the outgoing truck, one of those was the seating position — we wanted to raise the heel-to-hip, but we also wanted to make sure we had good head clearance. So we’ve actually grown the cabin slightly… also treadwidth extension… while door-to-door [distance] stays the same…with the overfenders the vehicle has gotten a bit wider. As a result of that, our effective area has become greater.”

What does that mean, practically? Well, the larger cabin that improves passenger comfort also comes with an increase in something called “Vehicle Demand Energy,” or “road load” as Brown calls it. This is effectively the power needed to propel the vehicle down the road, and can be quantified in terms of something called “coast down coefficients.” I won’t get into that right now, because the important thing is this: A bigger frontal area means more drag, as the drag force equation points out:

Notice how drag increases linearly with frontal area and drag coefficient. So if you increase your frontal area by X percent by increasing the cab size, and everything else stays the same, then you can expect your drag to go up by X percent. This, obviously, is not what Toyota wants — it wants to have its cake (a bigger cabin that allows for a more comfortable seating position) and eat it, too (i.e. not have to sacrifice road load and the associated fuel economy/emissions). Doing that means reducing the overall drag coefficient to compensate for the larger frontal area, and that means adding that hideous air dam.

“[Aero drag] is a contributor to road load… you can’t discount road load, and that road load really goes up when we’re talking about high-speed steady state… we wanted to really keep our aggressive styling… we wanted to keep the big shoulders on the truck. We really thought that was going to be important for stabilizing the truck to have that wide stance, so we had to look at different areas to improve aero,” Brown told me, saying the air dam really smooths the flow of air under the vehicle – an area that is typically extremely unaerodynamic.

The idea is: If you can push air to flow either around or under rather high-drag bits of the truck’s underbody (like that huge rear axle), then you can reduce the vehicle’s overall drag coefficient — in this case by “20 counts,” or 0.02 points of drag — a humongous figure in the world of aerodynamics.

Brown then got into the design of the air dam, noting the large holes on each side — one for a tie-down and one a recovery point for off-road snatch-jobs. He noted the holes are wide to allow for towing jobs at an angle that might pull a rope off to the side.

Why Not Use A Deployable/Retractable Air Dam?

In commenter Jake Harsh’s comment that I showed above, he wrote: “Please tell me that you can push a button to suck it up and out of harm’s way,” referring to what’s known in the industry as a deployable air dam or “active air dam” or “retractable air dam.” Such a device acts like air suspension in that it gives the best of all worlds: It provides good aerodynamics on the highway, but good ground clearance when going off-road.

“Now the question becomes ‘We could have done a retractable air dam,’ that’s the other way that we could have done this,” Brown told me. “We have to be careful with that one because you can see how large this [air dam] is — we gotta tuck that up somewhere. We gotta make sure that gets up and out of the way.”

As you can see in the image below, that air dam cannot fold backwards, as the short overhang means it would run into the tire. It could retract straight up like the F-150 air dam in the video above, but remember, this thing is the full width of the truck — that would require a lot of packaging space, which is needed for the cooling module, among other important bits.

“Front overhang is critically important, especially in the compact series — we really focus on approach angle… The other issue is, once we do tuck it up, we gotta tuck it way up [because]… people do take it off-road, and if you ever…damage that part, it is an emissions compliance part, you’d want to make sure that gets repaired, and candidly you wouldn’t like the replacement cost.”

In other words, an active air dam is a part of the truck’s emissions package, so if it fails, unfortunately, you may have to replace it, and it won’t be cheap.

“So we thought a better way to do that was to put this particular air dam on. I mean, I’m certainly not a fan. But there are the realities… and the tradeoffs that we are often forced to do.”

How To Take The Air Dam Off In Just A Few Minutes

The good news is that the air dam — which does not come on the off-road Tacoma trims — does come off via nine hex bolts with Phillips heads at their center, and per Brown, it doesn’t take long. “By the time it takes you to air down your tires, you’ve removed [this part],” he told me. Here’s a look at one of those nine bolts:

Kind of a bummer that you need a socket or screwdriver to get the air dam off, right? Why not make that air dam easily removable like the one on the 2008-2010 Jeep Grand Cherokee? Check it out:

Well, I asked that very question.

“Why did we not do the hand twist? A couple of different reasons… There are a couple of areas where we are a little bit tight… you gotta be able to get the whole hand up in there… so there was a hand space concern,” Brown told me. “The prevailing issue is: We’re pretty adamant that these things have to take a pretty good licking.”

“We wanna make sure they stay on the truck, so we use mechanical fasteners through a metal J-clip that is typically fastened to something rigid and solid. That makes sure these things don’t tear off — if you hit a snow bank… they’re higher than any curb stones so you shouldn’t [hit] any curbstones, but we expect them to take quite a beating and… stay on,” he said before kicking the air dam multiple times to prove his point.

“So when we started looking at some of the stuff that was easy to do and twist… we just didn’t get the retention value that we got out of the good ol’ fashioned mechanical fastener.”

And thus, you now know what went into Toyota’s decision to add that hideous air dam to the new Tacoma, why it has huge holes in it (to allow for sideways recovery), why there’s no retractable function (packaging space in the front overhang, cost, potential damage), and why Toyota decided to use regular ol’ bolts.

Was the air dam literally a direct result of trying to fix the outgoing truck’s awkward seating position? No, but it was a part of a chain reaction that resulted from that choice — part of an overall aerodynamic package that all works together to attempt to minimize drag (some of which was a result of a larger frontal area) while maintaining a rugged overall look.

You can read the full review of the 2024 Toyota Tacoma here.