- Travel to Tokyo, visit the Toyota Auto Museum and spend a few days driving around the wilderness of Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido.
- Thanks to the Flex company’s large dealer network, there are plenty of JDM Land Cruisers to choose from.
- It’s not cheap, but as a luxury vacation combined with Land Cruiser excitement, it might be worth it.
For a while, most major European automakers offered destination pickup, the option to travel directly to the factory to pick up the keys to your new car. If you had the time to travel and the patience to get your car shipped to this side of the Atlantic, this was a great way to start a new adventure in ownership. Volvo and Subaru still deliver the experience, and who wouldn’t want to enjoy the heritage of Stuttgart and then take a blast through the Black Forest in your brand new 911?
Across the Pacific, however, Japanese manufacturers have had no similar programs. A bit of a shame that, as you must think, the buyer of a Nissan GT-R might have wanted to stroll around the elevated highways of Tokyo and take a break. onigiri as part of the first boom of Japanese performance ownership. However, such a program now exists, and it comes from one of the unlikeliest new dealers in the US.
Flex Automotive, well established in Japan with a chain of about 50 dealers, established a beachhead in the U.S. four years ago and opened a store in San Diego. The business model is simple: everyone loves the look of a vintage Land Cruiser, but what if it had a modern Toyota underpinning? Flex takes Land Cruisers from the 1990s and early 2000s and dates them. There is also a retro-look pickup based on the Tacoma.
However, if you want to travel straight to Japan to pick up a 70 or 80 series JDM Land Cruiser then Flex offers now an unforgettable way to do this, the Japan Delivery Experience. Thanks to the strength of the dealer network, there is sufficient stock and experience in preparing and maintaining Toyotas. Once you’ve found one that suits you, get ready to hop on a flight to Tokyo’s Haneda Airport for a weeklong exploration of Japan.
The tour begins with the introduction of your new Land Cruiser in Yamanashi, just east of the sprawl of Tokyo. Then there’s the chance to drive it through parts of rural Japan and drive to the Toyota Auto Museum for a tour.
Then you hand over the keys while Flex prepares your new Land Cruiser for shipment to the United States, and you board a flight to Hokkaido. Here you will tour the Flex factory in Sapporo and then spend a few days driving Toyota Land Cruisers or Hiace vans through the wilderness of Hokkaido, staying in peacefully secluded huts.
Then it’s back home waiting for your Land Cruiser to arrive, possibly while you tick the boxes for your ultimate overlanding gear. It’s not cheap, at just under $18,000 for two people for the seven-day experience, but considering it includes domestic airfare as well as accommodation and car rental, it sounds like the Land Cruiser experience of a lifetime.
Part of the fun of owning a Land Cruiser is stickering the rear window with all the places you’ve been, from Moab to the Baja Peninsula. Here you get to add some JDM parks and museums to the glass, not just for bragging rights, but also to tell a good story around a communal campfire.
Should this effort prove even remotely successful, some mainstream Japanese manufacturers might sit up and take notice. After all, every MX-5 sold in North America has to be put on a ship in Hiroshima anyway. Imagine being able to fly out, pick up the keys to your new roadster at Mazda headquarters, visit the museum, and then take a drive through the canyon roads west of the city itself before flying back home.
The best car ownership experiences are all about the stories. Such overseas delivery will get you hooked on the first chapter.
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