Toyota Once Sold A 504 HP Pickup Truck That Was So Fast It Outran Real Sports Cars

For several decades, enthusiasts and manufacturers have seen pickup trucks as more than work vehicles. There’s something just plain fun about a truck that’s so fast it can outrun a car while towing a car. The usual suspects of the hot rod truck are Ford, Ram, and Chevrolet, but there was a time when Toyota dealers were able to give you the fastest truck on the street. Two decades ago, Toyota truck buyers were able to go to a dealer and have a factory-approved supercharger slapped onto their Tundras. The result was a truck that hit 60 mph in just 4.4 seconds, faster than any other truck on the road at the time and even quicker than real sports cars.

One of my favorite variations on the pickup truck is the muscle truck. The formula, which isn’t much different than the muscle car, involves putting as big an engine as you can find in a truck and then turning up the taps as much as possible. The 1964 Dodge D100 Custom Sports Special High-Performance Package is often claimed to be the first-ever muscle truck, and it was a great first. At a time when America was experiencing muscle car fever, the D100 CSS with optional 360 HP Street Wedge V8 meant that you could haul loads by day and stomp cars in stoplight drags at night.

Dodge would later flirt with muscle trucks only a decade later with the iconic Li’l Red Express. As our Jason Torchinsky has written before, the Li’l Red Express technically took advantage of an emissions regulation loophole that allowed it to be the fastest American car on the road in the late 1970s. That’s not an exaggeration, either. When Car and Driver tested the truck, it outran basically everything on the way to 100 mph.

The modern era of muscle began in the early 1990s. Chevrolet launched the hot and bulky 454SS, and Ford responded with the F-150 SVT Lightning. By the 2000s, Americans were totally spoiled for power and choice with so much power coming from multiple angles. Ford had the SVT Lightning around, and buyers got to experience 380 HP and 450 lb-ft of torque. Meanwhile, Chevrolet came to the party with the Silverado SS, which looked sinister while punching out up to 355 HP and 390 lb-ft of torque from its V8.

Of course, for many enthusiasts, the king of the 2000s muscle truck craze was the Dodge Ram SRT-10, which was a sport truck with the V10 heart of the Viper supercar. We’re talking 500 HP, 525 lb-ft of torque, and even a six-speed manual transmission. This was a pickup truck that stomped out 60 mph times in 4.9 seconds and achieved impressive (for a truck) quarter-mile times of 13.6 seconds. The SRT-10 is a truck I’m afraid we’ll never see again, and that makes me sad.

But what if I told you that there was a truck that was somehow even faster than a slithery snake with a bed on the back? In the late 2000s, the champion of the muscle truck wars was actually a Toyota Tundra TRD Supercharged, and while it didn’t have a legendary V10, it was somehow even faster.

The Tundra Used To Be Weird

The Tundra has quite a weird family lineage. As Automotive News writes, in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A. noticed that Toyota was essentially leaving cash on the table. American car buyers loved their compact Toyota Pickups, but once they felt they wanted something bigger, they traded in their Toyotas for something domestic because Toyota didn’t have anything bigger.

Eventually, Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A. did convince the mothership to give America a larger truck, but there was a problem. Toyota hadn’t ever built an American-style full-size truck before. The firm couldn’t just scale a compact truck up. Bigger trucks require components designed for heavier work, and Toyota didn’t have that or the tooling to make it happen. Toyota brass in Japan became convinced that they could beat the Big Three’s full-size pickups with a truck that was smaller, and they’d do it by making sure Toyota’s truck was smarter.

The 1993 Toyota T100 was the result and it was a bit of an oddball. It was bigger than a small truck, but smaller than a full-size. Yet, Toyota boasted a cab that was so big you were able to fit three cowboys on the front bench while they wore their hats. Toyota also added carlike features like adjustable seatbelt mounts, steering wheel-based cruise control, a CD player, and dashboard cupholders. Toyota even considered that short people might drive these trucks and even included a grab bar for the driver, something that the Americans struggled with back then.

Sadly, the T100 was one of those weird instances where the media couldn’t stop praising a vehicle, but the public couldn’t care less. It seemed that Toyota completely missed why Americans buy big trucks. While the media loved the smart pickup truck, Toyota learned the hard way that Americans buy big trucks for V8 power and for capability, even if they rarely need either. The T100 had a thrifty four-cylinder and a decent V6, but never the V8 Americans crave.

Weirdly, when Toyota decided to take a second crack at the American pickup, it did manage to give us a V8, but still stuck with making a truck that was merely nearly a full-size, from my retrospective:

Toyota began to recognize its mistake early on. It answered the calls for a bigger cab, but didn’t have any quick solutions to the price or the engine. MotorWeek notes that Toyota planned to move production to America to save the T100 from the Chicken Tax as well as to get a V8 from a domestic automaker to solve that complaint.

Toyota’s response to the poor sales of the T100 was to make a larger successor, the T150. This truck would eventually become known as the Tundra, but not before it went through its own nightmare of a development cycle. Automotive News notes that when Toyota first displayed the Tundra to dealers it had a V6. Dealers told Toyota to give it a V8 or don’t even bother. The Tundra did end up with a V8 and sales soared, but Toyota still received complaints about the first-generation Tundra being too small and not having the hauling capabilities of an American truck.

Third Time’s The Charm

Toyota finally realized that to succeed in America, it had to build an American truck rather than hope Americans would fall for a different kind of truck. As MotorTrend wrote in 2007, the Big Three were selling 2 million trucks a year while Toyota and Nissan struggled to sell an eighth of that.

For Toyota’s third crack, it decided to have Americans largely design the truck that would be built and sold in America. Development on the second-generation Tundra began in Torrance, California, where Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A. was located. Much of the truck’s engineering was done in the Toyota Technical Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Even the styling was handled by the famous Toyota Calty Research and Design in Michigan and California.

To be clear, the second-generation Tundra was a multinational effort involving Japanese staff, but Americans were largely at the wheel because what better than to have Americans making trucks for Americans? Toyota also wanted to drum up the “American-ness” of the new Tundra. In 2003, Toyota broke ground on a manufacturing facility in San Antonio, Texas, to help build the truck. That facility still builds Toyota trucks today!

I’m not kidding about Toyota really driving home the “American” bit. Press releases said it was built for the “True Trucker” and that it was a “true American truck.” Toyota went as far as to say that the then-new Tundra was the most American car the automaker had ever built.

But Toyota also wasn’t just trying to build an American truck. It also wanted to beat the Americans at their own game. At the time, Toyota marketed the eight-foot, one-inch long bed option as having the deepest box below the rails in its class. The tailgate was made to be lockable and easily removable for contractors to fit a utility cap in the bed.

Toyota even designed the cab around the American blue-collar worker. The second-generation Tundra has intentionally oversized door handles and interior controls so that you can easily use the truck while wearing work gloves. The interior was also designed with a glovebox large enough to fit a Thermos and the dash was designed to support a laptop and a clipboard. Toyota then sent technical data to aftermarket manufacturers five months before launch so that buyers could customize their trucks right away.

The second-generation Tundra launched in November 2006, and deliveries began in early 2007. Reading reviews, it sounds like Toyota had a hit. From MotorTrend:

Drive the new Tundra and you can’t keep the John Ford western image out of your head, mostly because Toyota fosters it. The Tundra is Texas-built and the product of both Japanese and American designers, engineers and marketing mavens who have immersed themselves in ten gallon-hat culture. Drive it unaware of its badges, if you could, and you’d think you’re driving the next Dodge Ram. Its long, massive hood qualifies for Nimitz-class aircraft carrier status. Its interior has the space of a Dallas-to-Houston drive, with storage bins that could stow an entire Scion dealership inventory. Interior handles and switchgear and stuff feels as if designed for Andre the Giant, someone bigger than you no matter who you are. The only thing that might keep you from thinking of the ’07 Tundra as an American pickup truck is your own nationalistic prejudice.

Despite extensive use of lightweight materials like an aluminum driveshaft in the new Tundra, it’s a big, heavy beast. The upside is that towing capacity is up to 10,800 pounds (versus 7200 pounds max in the ’06 Tundra). The downside is that an ’07 Access Cab with the optional 5.7-liter iForce V-8 weighs about 560 to 575 pounds more than an ’06 Double Cab with the 4.7-liter V-8. So while the new Tundra’s arrival is depicted as the Second Coming in some circles, it doesn’t defy its mass with revolutionary ride, handling or comfort.

The critical thing noted here is that Toyota finally built a truck that was actually full-size. Then, Toyota gave the truck huge power to match its huge size. The base engine was a 4.0-liter V6 making a respectable 236 HP and 266 lb-ft of torque. Moving up from there is a 4.7-liter V8 good for 271 HP and 313 lb-ft of torque. Finally, the flagship engine was an aluminum 5.7-liter V8 rated at 381 HP and 401 lb-ft of torque.

MotorTrend noted that it was better than GM’s 6.0 V8 of the day, which made 367 HP and 375 lb-ft of torque. The publication also talked about the suspension:

All Tundras have control arms and low-pressure gas shocks in front, with a 1.4-inch diameter anti-roll bar and a live rear axle with leaf springs and nitrogen gas shocks, plus four-wheel antilock brakes, electronic braking distribution, brake assist, traction control and vehicle stability control. Four-wheel-drive automatically gets you active traction control.

Unfortunately, period reviews noted that the Tundra’s interior looked better than it actually felt to your hands.

But I suppose that didn’t matter much to Tundra buyers, more than one of which have taken their trucks past the million-mile mark. One of these trucks, owned by Victor Sheppard, surpassed a million miles on its original engine and transmission, which is incredible. The second million-mile Tundra, which was also owned by Sheppard, did require a second transmission, but allegedly, it made it all of the way to 860,000 miles before the transmission needed a major repair.

The Toyota Tundra TRD Supercharged

Toyota has long offered factory accessories to soup up your vehicle. Toyota has offered a supercharger for the Tacoma, Solara, and even the iQ. The cool thing is that if you buy tuning parts from Toyota Racing Development, your Toyota keeps its factory warranty.

In 2008, Toyota Racing Development went for a dive through its parts bin to showcase the factory-approved mods that buyers could do to their Tundras. The top option was a supercharger kit, which added an Eaton Twin Vortices System roots-type supercharger to any Tundra with a 5.7-liter V8. If you bought this new in 2008, you were looking at $25,225 for a Tundra with a standard bed and a regular cab plus the 5.7 V8. Then you paid an additional $5,875 for the supercharger.

According to Hot Rod magazine, this supercharger upgrade is 50-state compliant, and as I said before, it was covered by the truck’s 60,000-mile factory warranty. Reportedly, a dealer took about a day to carry out the installation.

It’s noted that the installation isn’t just slapping a supercharger on the V8. If you got the supercharger, the dealer used your base truck’s fuel rails but installed high-flow fuel injectors. Here’s a pretty cool graphic from Eaton:

Eaton says that the twin four-lobe rotor design features a 160-degree twist, which improves air handling, noise, and vibration for a linear application of power from the 8.5 psi of boost. Here’s more from Eaton about all of the vehicles these superchargers have been put into:

There is no set formula or segment in which a supercharger is used. Eaton TVS technology can be found on jet skis that require a small engine with high power density, to a V8 engine for a performance vehicle. Superchargers can also work in concert with turbochargers in extreme engine downsizing applications. New opportunities are opening up every day.

TVS technology plays an integral role in enabling new advanced combustion solutions by providing a rapid transient response with precise, metered air flow that is not reliant on exhaust energy, like the turbocharger solutions found in today’s mainstream market. 

Hydrogen fuel cells, once considered a future technology, are here today and our TVS technology can be used to compress air and pump it into the fuel cell stack, enabling a chemical reaction that generates electricity. TVS also is a key enabler for industrial safety applications, such as pressurization of an engine compartment to keep debris and particles out.

Now, you could have equipped your Tundra with just the Supercharger (like the truck above has) and went on with your life. However, TRD would have really loved it if you went the full ride. That meant a dual-exhaust system for $1,065, a performance suspension for $1,464, 16-inch cross-drilled rotors and six-piston calipers for $2,795, and forged TRD wheels with performance tires for $4,699. If you got everything, you were looking at $15,898 on top of your $25,225 truck, at minimum.

That’s a lot of cash, but as the car buff mags indicated, the result was not just a sport truck, but the fastest truck on the market. I’m talking 504 HP and 550 lb-ft of torque. That’s more power than the Dodge Ram SRT-10 and a lot more speed, too. From Car and Driver:

“Like Driving a Ballistic Building”

Now, we at Car and Driver are generally given to the notion that there are no such things as too many ponies or too much twist. Of course, one must have the traction to harness them. Trying to launch an unladen, rear-drive pickup with the power of a thousand suns was, to put it mildly, difficult. The truck’s traction-control light was on more often than it was off no matter where we were—the freeway, Sunset Boulevard, our living room. “It’s like you’re always on snow,” said C/D technical editor Aaron Robinson.

But we sure had fun trying. Dusty conditions at an impromptu testing location precluded us from getting trustworthy test numbers, but we feel pretty confident saying this truck would accomplish 0 to 60 in about 4.7 seconds and conquer a quarter-mile in 13.5 seconds. As with the Lightning and the SRT10, the sensation of such a big thing charging forward so dramatically is eerie. Robinson described it best: “It’s like driving a ballistic building.”

Accurately controlling the truck was sometimes as difficult as putting its power down. The gas pedal offered little resistance, which meant that bumps in the road inadvertently turned into highly dramatic unintended-acceleration events. Although it had good on-center feel, the unmodified steering system communicated nothing once the wheel was turned. The ride, on the other hand, wasn’t nearly as awful as we had expected, considering the paper-thin tires, stiffer dampers, and lower ride height. Indeed, the TRD suspension upgrades offered better body control during power transitions over the stock truck.

And MotorTrend:

Sure, there’s been other regular-cab sport trucks like Ford’s SVT Lightning and Dodge’s SRT-10 Ram, but this Tundra stomps ’em both, handily, in the 0-to-60 test by almost a half second. The Tundra dashes to 60 in 4.4 seconds making it faster than your car, if you’re driving a Mustang GT (5.1), Dodge Challenger SRT8 (4.6), Jaguar XF SC (4.90), Audi S5 coupe (4.5), or BMW 135i (4.6), and as fast as our long-term 2006 Porsche Carrera S.

The whir of the supercharger is reminiscent of the old Lightning’s, but the kick feels more linear and consistent. Power is on tap almost immediately without a slam-bang delivery. For the sake of civility, the tip-in is controllable, if you exercise restraint. But after a couple of head-snapping launches, it’s nearly impossible to avoid exorcizing the tire tread instead. On the freeway, passing involves little more than a brush of the accelerator for pinpoint lane changes usually reserved for sports cars. Street truck aerodynamics aren’t condusive to high-speeds with 0-to-100 mph times comparable to those of the Porsche Cayman and old S/C Yenko Camaro.

Obviously, there can be a downside to voluminous power. Gasoline usage is one — but I can live with it. The other is traction control. Our truck isn’t governed by an indomitable nanny. A recent Southern California rain proved you could slip the tires in the wet stuff, even with TCS on, if you’re not careful. Engage the traction-system override and it’s possible to fry rubber ’til your nose bleeds.

Hod Rod put the super truck on a dyno, finding out that the truck put down 452 HP and 508 lb-ft of torque at the wheels, a whopping 143 rwhp bump. Even wilder was that the truck still made more than 400 lb-ft of torque right to redline.

The mags did note some downsides. Of course, one of them was that supercharging the 5.7-liter V8 wasn’t good for fuel economy. Another was that the big brake kit actually performed worse than the base truck’s brakes in some situations. Oof.

You Can Still Find Them

So, in a way, this was like the Ford F-150 FP700. The Toyota Tundra TRD Supercharged overpowered both its drivers and its brakes. If that’s not a total hot rod, I don’t know what is. Sadly, I couldn’t really tell you how many of these are out there. Like with Toyota’s other TRD dealer-installed gadgetry, nobody really knows just how many were sold. But these trucks are considered to be rare.

In this case, rare can mean valuable. One of the cheaper ones I’ve found appeared on Cars & Bids in 2024 and sold for $17,000. That truck had 152,800 miles. Others on Bring a Trailer and similar have sold for $28,000 and up. So, it seems truck enthusiasts still have a love affair with these rigs. Toyota gave owners the option to outfit their Tundras with the supercharger from 2008 to 2013, then killed its supercharger option entirely in 2019.

So, you can still find these out there if you look hard enough. The wildest thing about all of this is still just the fact that for many years, the fastest truck in America wasn’t a Ford or a Dodge with a Viper engine, but a Toyota. Heck, in some cases, a Tundra TRD Supercharged may be faster to launch than a Ram TRX, which is insane. Maybe one day we’ll see crazy Toyota do something like this again. Even if it might not be a hot seller, it’s so cool that at least the option to build the most ridiculous street truck with a warranty is there.