The Toyota Tacozilla is your new V6-powered micro-house

Feeling guilt at being besotted with what you see here, having considered yourself an enemy of the campervan scene? Well worry not, because it’s not a campervan. Toyota informs us the Tacozilla is ‘a backwoods overlanding-ready micro-house rig’. So there you go.

Based on the present-day Tacoma, it pays tribute to Toyota campers of the Seventies and Eighties. It’s starring on the brand’s SEMA show stand and is described as ‘100 per cent custom’, with a stack of TRD branded parts as well as a bespoke rear shell thrown at it.

“Our goal was to build a vehicle that is engineered correctly but also made to look really cool,” designer and builder Marty Schwerter says. “Being around racecars my whole life, racecars are cool looking. I want campers to be cool looking, too.”

Have retro graphics and rounded-off edges done the trick? Either way, it’s no mean feat making a camper out of a pick-up – the goal was to make it so a six-footer can walk around inside, and Schwerter assures us they’ve done it. However cramped the on-board loo looks.

“Its tapered shape also made it challenging to fabricate the camper’s rear door,” we’re told. “The team could have fitted a flat door but decided the result would not look as integrated. All in all, the team spent well over 100 hours designing the rear door alone.”

Attention to detail has been top of the list, then, It’s designed to properly off-road, too, with chunky all-terrain tyres, a snorkel strapped to the A-pillar and a hardy looking winch. Based on a Tacoma TRD Sport, all four wheels are driven by 278bhp 3.5-litre V6 engine. Making it one powerful micro-house, huh?