Toyota just issued a recall affecting 161,000 trucks, 2024 and 2025 Tundras built between August 2023 and June 2025 at the San Antonio plant, due to a software glitch. Not exactly the kind of attention a struggling full-size pickup needs when sales are already sliding.
Last year, the Tundra dropped over seven percent to roughly 148,000 deliveries, while its smaller sibling, the Tacoma, surged 43 percent to nearly 275,000 units. Meanwhile, Ford’s F-Series casually moved 828,000 trucks, up 8.3 percent. Apparently, dominating a segment for decades never gets old.
The Tundra XK70, one of Toyota’s early adopters of the TNGA-F platform is starting to show its age. The 2026 model year is already on sale, priced from $41,260, but rumors suggest the 2027 refresh will bring a much-needed mid-cycle update. Five years is a lifetime in the truck world, especially when your competition keeps printing money.
The folks at AutoYa‘s CGI-focused satellite channel, AutoYa Interior, have already rendered what the 2027 facelift might look like. Externally, the hypothetical design doesn’t reinvent the wheel. Subtle tweaks to the bumper and headlights introduce a new LED daytime running light signature, because nothing screams “evolution” like slightly different eyebrows.
Inside, however, the changes are more substantial. The steering wheel now features the “Toyota” script instead of the traditional logo, and the infotainment system has morphed into a panoramic unit: a single screen stretching from behind the wheel to the center of the dashboard. Picture-in-picture functionality allows the digital instrument cluster to overlap the main display, giving drivers the feeling of piloting a spaceship, or at least a very expensive console on wheels.
The rendering also includes various CGI color options for both exterior and interior, along with side-by-side comparisons between the current model and the speculative 2027 version. Whether a bigger screen and redesigned headlights will be enough to close the gap with Ford remains to be seen. But at this point, Toyota needs more than cosmetic surgery.
