The era of luxury apartment grey is so over. You know what I’m talking about — those laminate plank floors. While the past few years have thrown words like “demure” and “mindful” at us, it seems like maximalism is finally making a comeback. It’s time for noisy music, flash photography, and oh yes, bright colors to return. In that vein, Toyota’s TRD Pro Tacoma, 4Runner, Tundra, and Sequoia are getting a new Wave Maker color for the 2026 model year, and trust me, you aren’t going to be able to ignore it.
The TRD Pro line has previously offered some bold colors like the intensely saturated Voodoo Blue, the electric Lime Rush, and the bright Solar Octane, but things have gone muted over the past few years. The red-brown of 2024’s Terra looks like viewing lava in a solar eclipse, and 2025’s Mudbath is far more demure, largely because it’s less saturated than the Quicksand color that was popular on the old Tacoma. It’s time things flipped back to bright, and Wave Maker is bright indeed.
Forget mere blue, Wave Maker is pretty much cyan, and it rules. It looks even more vibrant than the Blue Vector color available on last year’s Lexus IS 500, and you already needed sunglasses to look at that car in the sunlight. Like blue raspberry or blue cotton candy, this new color is the sort of blue that feels engineered in the best way possible.
Of course, new highlight colors often come with interesting designer speak attached, and Wave Runner elicited an amusing quote from CALTY Ann Arbor general manager Benjamin Jiminez: “With Wave Maker, we were inspired by unexplored areas of adventure including extreme territory and even beyond earth.” Beyond earth? Correct me if I’m wrong, but the planet most similar to Wave Runner in color is Uranus, a celestial body impossible to talk about with any sort of maturity. If that’s part of the inspiration, I can understand the somewhat unusual phrasing.
Perhaps best of all, because Wave Maker is a TRD Pro truck and SUV exclusive, you’re going to get a lot of it, should you tick the option box. A Tacoma already isn’t exactly small, but just imagine seeing a Wave Maker Sequoia in person. That’s a whole lot of this color in one place, a rolling billboard for making interesting and exciting choices.
We’ll have to wait until autumn for Wave Maker to start showing up on the 2026 TRD Pro models, and while it seems like a summer color, maybe the timing works because this hue also seems like it could fight back a little against seasonal depression. Even under the overcast skies in some press photos, it’s still megawatt material. Anyway, kudos to Toyota for trying a bright color again. While we do wish for greater availability, it’s possible the color grows popular enough to breach TRD Pro containment. After all, Inferno was a TRD Pro color before it spread to other Toyota models.
Top graphic credit: Toyota/smurf.com
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I’m bummed. From the topshot and headline, I thought the actual name was going to be Smurfy. Wave Maker? 6/10 at best.
Wave Maker Prius please.
Great blue! Shame it’s only limited to 1 trim. Colors like these should be available across the board. On all cars!
Actually sort of looks like my Mild Seven Alonzo hat.
I love that blue, but not on those trucks. A Type 51 Bugatti would be lovely . Or a Simca-Gordini T15S would be really nice. Ok I’ll be happy with a R12 Gordini.
I’d be happy to have it on my white 2017 Ford Focus.
Yes yes and yes! I love a great blue, and Toyota has been crushing it the past few years blue-wise (don’t forget the Blue Flame on the Corolla and whatever the RAV4 blue was called). Down with the German “shades”!!! (Can’t really even call them colors…)
Send one of these over to Mazda. Drives me nuts how they have done the ND Miata dirty with the sorry ass lack of color choices. This is an awesome Miata color.
Absolutely fantastic color. Hopefully it will be relatively common. No way to tell, since Toyota doesn’t let you build to spec.
Now go put the Sequoia’s TT V6 hybrid in the 4Runner you cowards!
Every Toyota TRD should be some shade of brown, for obvious reasons.
Yum. Three of my four vehicles are blue. The one that isn’t is an F350 longbed dually, which probably wasn’t availabl in blue.