Endless Thread - Toyota Hilux trucks - why are they popular online and in war zones?

Episode Date: April 4, 2025

In April of 2024, a group of aid workers were killed by Israeli Defense Forces while bringing food to Central Gaza. The IDF had alleged that its military analysts had identified a gunman on top of one of the trucks carrying supplies, suggesting it was a military vehicle, not an aid vehicle. In the online debate following the event, a familiar trope popped up: arguing over whether one of the aid trucks a Toyota Hilux. The reason? In military conflict around the globe, the Hilux is a familiar character. Whether you're a U.S. designated terrorist group, a "freedom fighter," or someone else involved in direct armed conflict, you probably know about the Hilux. Endless Thread wanted to know why, and how, this happened. So we took a journey beyond America's commercial pickup truck identity to understand why beyond our borders, the Hilux is the truck of choice. Credits: This episode was produced by Ben Brock Johnson and Dean Russell.  Mix and sound design by Paul Vaitkus. It was co-hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson.

Support for endless thread comes from Mathworks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? And, of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts.

WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Yeah, I'm Warren Stoddard. I'm in a MFA program for creative writing and do some teaching and some working on motorcycles. I guess what you would call for a living. All right. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I like it.

Something like that. Warren's daughtered is a man who some might describe as having an old soul. When he speaks, he speaks slowly, thoughtfully. He sounds like he's working stuff out. My dad was killed when I was younger. Warren's from a little town in Texas, the big state with big hats, big trucks. And for Warren, big memories. I was about three years old, three and a half.

And can remember that vividly and like remember the feeling of that loss. And I always was like sort of obsessed with this idea of what you leave behind whenever you're gone. After his father was killed in an altercation with a neighbor, Warren's own history took a somewhat expected route. Texas State, football, knee injuries from football, an inability to enlist in the military because knee injuries from football. But then things got unexpected again. It's always been pretty hard for me to ignore things that are happening on the world stage just because I'm, I guess, interested in history and interested in how my life might intersect with history. Warren's life first intersected with history when, after viewing the Turkish invasion of what he describes as a peaceful Kurdish enclave in Syria,

he says he found, amongst the dregs of a Google search, an email address for joining a Kurdish fighting force. They sent me a questionnaire. I answered the questions. They sent me a bunch of books that I needed to read. I read all the books and did a little book report. And they liked my answers enough. And they told me to buy a one-way ticket to Suleimania in Iraq.

It was in Iraq where Warren would enter the fray of the war against ISIS. And where, a long way from Texas, he noticed the local truck trend. First time I ever saw Torto Harleks was in Sulemania. You couldn't just fly into Syria, so Warren got smuggled over the Iraq border in a pickup truck. We were all piled up in the back of one of those. I think there's 12 of us in the bed, and the bed was covered so that from the outside it looked like somebody might be transporting chickens. It was just incredibly rough terrain. It was the kind of road that seemed like a mule.

or a horse or a person on foot might be able to traverse. It felt very old. But doing it in that truck was just this lurching, bouncing, bumpy ride in the middle of the night. And the truck never missed a beat. Warren and other fighters eventually headed to the front line of combat, landing in a city in southern Syria on the banks of the Euphrates. His group of fighters was trying to push into a suburb. Several guys, including Warren, ended up in an abandoned house.

He says that first night, it was the coldest he'd ever been in his life. The next day, they burned the furniture they could find in the house. The other side was lighting fires, too. ISIS lit a bunch of tires on fire and kind of created this huge black cloud that drifted over the top and toward us so that they could get cover from any airstrikes to kind of add to their fortune, a dust storm then rolled in. Then maybe at 2 o'clock that afternoon, we started taking small arms fire. Warren and his fellow fighters set out to engage with ISIS.

To do that, they had to get to the rooftop of the house they were in and returned fire. And then three of us ran up onto the roof and got into a little bit of a firefight. Warren isn't sure, but he thinks the U.S. military was supposed. reporting the Kurds by shooting mortars towards the ISIS positions. But it was windy, and the mortars were landing close by the Kurds. All of a sudden, a big explosion erupted in the wall on the rooftop next to Warren's face. I got shot by a doucheca. What's that?

It's kind of like an anti-aircraft gun, 50-kow, hybrid. They're real big. Warren thinks the gun that hit him was positioned in a water tower. but he wasn't even sure what hit him at first. I kept patting myself because I felt numb in these spots, and I thought that was weird. And then grabbed the back of my leg and pulled my hand away, and it was covered in blood.

And then I looked down, and my boot had a little hole in it, and then there was blood starting to pool inside the boot. So then I was like, well, it looks like I'm injured. One of the other Arab fighters who had been with them on the rooftop was standing with Warren. He was like, I think we gotta get you out of here. I was like, that sounds like a great idea. I wouldn't mind that at all.

Yeah, that sounds wonderful. Thank you. He says that the 50 caliber bullet that exploded in the wall next to him sent two pieces of shrapnel into his face. Another piece had lodged in Warren's armpit. Another piece took out a chunk of his leg. Warren says another fighter pulled up from behind the combat line in a pickup truck modified with armor.

He was hoisted into the vehicle and sped out of there. Warren remembers that drive well. Especially the sound of the shelling from the other side. He says the shells exploding around the truck were singing. Just the noise of the metal coming off of the mortar bursts. It has a certain whistle hiss that goes through the air. But the one detail that Warren, seems to keep coming back to in his story.

Is it a detail you might not notice if Warren didn't sound almost wistful about it. The one thing that got him into Syria and the one thing that got him out. A pickup truck called the Toyota High Lux. The truck that I got slung into was a High Lux. They had seen some stuff. There was a bullet hole in the windshield, but it was a... pickup truck, and then they just spread me out of there. We think of the pickup truck as the American car.

We know what it represents. According to the advertisements, we're fed all the time in America. Masculinity, durability, dependability, toughness. Ford pickups are built tough. Let's see that again. Some terrific pounding, huh? Like a rockness. The most country guitar-plucking, heavyweight hauling, hard hat.

wearing, mud spraying, America identity, making commercials you will ever see on television are for every form of the American-made truck. There are a lot of four-by-fours out there, but there's only one Jeep. In America, you have a certain set of American truck options. But if you go anywhere outside of America, if you look beyond the towering, ever-rising front grill of the American truck industry, and get under the hood of the Internet, Photos and videos from all over the world will tell you there is one vehicle that seems to leave the others eaten dust. The Toyota Hilux, a small, unassuming, boxy pickup that started production in the 1960s,

and has become the subject of entire YouTube channels, Instagram accounts, websites, and endless comment thread discussions. United States designated terrorist groups use it. Freedom fighters like Warren use it. Military contractors use it. The Hyluck seems to have become the vehicle used everywhere across the world where heavy-duty stuff is happening. And the thing we wanted to understand is how and why. I'm Amory Severson.

I'm Ben Brock Johnson, and you're listening to Endless Thread. We're coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR. Today's episode, Toyotas of War. Let's start with the name, which is not a real word. It's two. Highlux, as in high luxury. It's a portmanteau. And true to car manufacturer form,

the highlux doesn't exactly hold up to the suggestion of its name. What it does do is hold up. This is the famous automotive show from the UK, top gear. First, they take a highlux and submerge it in the ocean, let the tide go in and out, and then drive it out. of the ocean. And that's just the beginning. Now, earlier on, I left our Toyota pickup on top of a tower block that was about to be

demolished with explosives. Who would like to see what happens next? Yay! What happens next is the Top Gear hosts show this high looks at the top of a high-rise building, then they demolish the building and drive the truck out of the rubble. The message is, this truck, it's indestructible. Which has also made it the stuff of internet legend. Here's a YouTuber calling himself Whistlin Diesel,

doing a kind of Southern boy response to the Top Gear episode, years later. Today, we find out. Will it really hold up? I'll back home with a skid loader. There you go. He's driving one full tilt through a field, with the back holding a massive pile of cinder blocks. Whistland Diesel's got 10 million subscribers,

and there's loads more Hylux content where this came from. Google it. H-I-L-U-X, and you'll see endless pictures of these boxy trucks, usually the 80s and 90s sort of vintagey-looking ones, all over the internet. I got interested in the history of this vehicle because of a story from last April. When a group of aid workers were killed by Israeli defense forces while bringing food to central Gaza. In Israeli airstrike on Monday, killed seven people working with Jose Andres' international Food Charity, the World Central Kitchen, the three-vehicle convoy, which is marked with the world. The IDF alleged that its military analysts had identified a gunman on top of one of the trucks

carrying supplies, suggesting it was a military vehicle, not an aid vehicle. In the online chatter around this incident, I saw a lot of people talking about the fact that one of the aid vehicles hit by the IDF's drone-fired missiles was a Toyota Hylux, which kicked off this very of the now a discussion online. Accusations of misinformation, subterfuge, and random pickup truck facts. And that's how he started to realize how ubiquitous this truck was, how rabid its fan base was, all over the world, and how it's been that way for a long time. So I'll do like 50 years of history and hopefully five minutes or less. This is Chris. Chris has run a website and a very popular Instagram account called Toyotas of War, which is as advertised. Photos, videos, articles, information,

even gear you can buy related to Toyota trucks involved in military conflict. Meta deleted the Instagram account Toyotas of War last year for not following community guidelines. The company was not specific about that, although the account had been temporarily banned before for promoting violence. Chris says, Toyota's of war and its new iteration, Cruisers of War, never promoted violence. But like Warren, Chris is obviously also enamored. My specific favorite car would be the 79 series, land cruiser, single cab with the truck bed. But the history of Toyota trucks going global goes back much further than 1979. It starts with World War II, when America had a lot of success with a particular ground vehicle.

The Willys Jeep is how most Americans refer to it. It's Willys or Willis, however you want to say it. However you want to say it, that vehicle was great. But it was made in the States. And when the Korean War started, just a few years after World War II ended, and America got involved. America do be getting involved in war. It do.

And American forces wanted vehicles like the Willis easily available wherever it wanted to get involved around the world. So it turned to Japan, a country that had recently surrendered to the U.S. and said, hey, we need to create vehicles that are close to Korea. You're very close to there. Here's the schematics. Produce this and we'll see what we can do with it. This, Chris says, led to what was called the Toyota Jeep BJ, which became the 40-ser. And that truck worked really well. And so when you look back, the vehicle was founded on a military design, very simplistic, reliability was a premium, and also keeping costs low.

The United States military budget, the biggest in the world, and bigger than the next seven biggest military budgets combined, but keep those costs low on the trucks. We kid, but Toyota's ability to keep costs low has had an impact around the world. Another thing Chris says that Toyota has become known for, logistics. Parts are just everywhere. You know, it's, I'm not joking when I say this. You can just go to a look.

Let's say if you have an issue overseas, you can go to any Toyota dealership and they can get parts to you typically in three to four days. So that's a huge appeal. And this is all part of why. After the Korean War, Toyota's have been involved in almost every conflict in some role or some fashion. But one conflict stands out. So that was the Chad, Libya war. In French, the Gere de Toyota, or Great Toyota War, took place on the border between northern Chad and Libya.

In the scorching deserts of northern Africa, a surprising and unconventional war unfolded. It started with a Libyan occupation of Northern Chad by Muammar Gaddafi. Gaddafi had a goal of gaining more territory for Libya by helping. to overthrow the Chadian president Yisen Habre. The ensuing war saw the more heavily armed military of Gaddafi lining up to face Chadian fighters with fewer resources. Then France entered the fray, giving air support to Chadian troops. France's help from the sky was a big deal. But so was France's help in providing 400 Toyota pickups. In comparison to Gaddafi's tanks, the trucks were faster,

easier to repair, could go farther on less fuel, and they carried more fighters on them. Oh, and these trucks were equipped with guided missile launchers. Here's Chris again. You know, these guys were using today's dollars, probably five to $10,000 trucks, and they're just destroying half a million dollar tanks. Everyone in the tanks just got smoked. The Great Toyota War officially ended on September 11th, 1987. But it was the beginning of what has, in some ways, been the identity of the Hylux ever since.

It's the reason you can find posts asking about the Toyota Hylux all over Reddit, why you hear about Toyota trucks being associated with terrorists. Or freedom fighters, depending on who you're talking to. While its history is connected to national military forces, the Hylux has moved into this extra military present, where the lines get very blurry. The Hylix has become a very popular vehicle for what has come to be known as the technical. A technical is generally a civilian vehicle that has been converted to military usage, normally by the means of mounting a heavy weapon on it.

More from that guy in a minute. Support for this podcast comes from Nature is the Solution, a podcast from the Nature Conservancy. When it comes to the environment, it's easy to focus. on doom and gloom, but that's not the whole story, especially when there are so many projects working towards bringing people and nature together. In this moment, optimism isn't naive, it's necessary. Follow nature is the solution wherever you listen to podcasts and discover stories of impact and possibility. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science,

neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of. the stories. Stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcast. There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice. Beautifully produced audio has the unique power to connect and inspire. Tell your organization's story with a custom podcast from CitySpace Productions, the Creative Studio from WBUR's business partnerships team.

Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. We found Ed Nash in Thailand. It is nine, well, five past nine in the evening, so I'm 12 hours in front of you. So not too bad.

All right. How's the future? Ed is another enthusiast who's turned his enthusiasm into a career of informing on the internet. He's written a book about improvised armored vehicles used by Syrian Democratic forces in their war against ISIS. And he has a YouTube channel called Military Matters. Where I look at military history and current military affairs. A lot of his YouTube videos are about aircraft. It's got some people to accuse me of being an aviation historian. I can't pretend to be there.

But Ed also does a lot on trucks. Hyluxes, they've sold something like more than 17 million since they started making them. And land cruises like more than 10 million globally. Yes, Ed is also a big Toyota guy with lots of Toyota facts. It's also fair to say that Ed is very into technicals, a civilian vehicle with a heavy weapon on it. And that could be as simple as mounting a heavy machine gun on it, all the way up to some of the real oddities we've seen around the world, such as rocket pods from helicopter gunships being mounted on the back of them

and being used as artillery. And it's basically a way to turn a heavy weapon into something more flexible tactically to give it more mobility. Technicles, like Hyluxes, have a long history intertwined with armed conflict. In some ways, they've replaced what would in classical times suppose be cavalry. You have a highly mobile force that can charge around attacking the enemy behind the lions, also use them as rapid deployment for troops. Remember Warren from the beginning?

He also said a hylux can carry a lot of fighters with ease. So you can fit 12 dudes in the back with all of their AKs, and then if you really want to, you can fit eight in the cab. So that's 20 guys riding in a high lux, not terribly unlike a clown car. Warren actually associates this clown car with the gun those clowns might be carrying. Another pure representation of something that won't let you down when it counts. I think of the high lux as the AK-47 of pickup trucks, right? It's the cheapest, most efficient, most durable vehicle.

Ed Nash and Warren Stoddard have something in common beyond an apparent enthusiasm for Hyluxes. They've both fought ISIS in Syria. They seem to have had similar reasons, too. ISIS were on the rise. They were all over the news. Obviously, they've risen, I think, in 2014. All the stories were coming about the atrocities they were coming in. So I wondered if I could go and help there.

In another example of the current complexity of how we conduct war, around the world. Ed and Warren didn't fight on behalf of a national military force. They both fought in the YPG, also called the People's Defense Units, or People's Protection Units, which is described as a libertarian socialist, U.S.-backed Kurdish militant group in Syria. When he joined up about 10 years ago, Ed saw a lot of Hylux technicals. In Syria, technicals were used more as like direct support. artillery. They weren't used for charging up on an enemy. They'd stand off, normally have a fairly heavy weapon, a heavy machine gun, and they'd fire, you know, kilometer to two kilometers,

sometimes three kilometers away to provide suppressive fire. When I first learned of the Hylux, I wanted to know why, according to the internet, this particular pickup was the only pickup for terrorists. But the more we talked to guys who had experience in war zones, the more it became obvious. The Hylux is the only pickup for anyone who needs a non-official military vehicle. Chris, the guy who started the Toyotas of War website and Instagram page, is a good example. He didn't fall into this stuff because he got curious about it online. It was part of his job in the U.S. How he became obsessed with him is I used to work for a defense contractor. and we built land cruisers for guys overseas.

Yep. Chris, who didn't want to share his last name because of his work, started an internship for a defense contractor in Kentucky that was souping up Toyota trucks and sending them across the world. Chris says he can't say much specifically about the souping up part. I'll have to be obscure, very limited on that. But yeah, it's typically just armoring packed. typically around like B7, cooling modifications, and then after that, it's just your imagination

is the limiting factor of what they're doing with these vehicles. The point is, the Hylux pops up on all sides of conflict, which had us wondering, how does Toyota think about and talk about the popularity of this little, unassuming truck? Ed Nash has had some of the same questions. He says back in 2015. The U.S. authorities actually questioned Toyota about this because ISIS used so many Toyota vehicles. And honestly, I think the answer to that is super simple.

Toyotas make really, really good vehicles. The answer from the car company at the time was, we don't sell the people who are going to use them for military purposes. But how do you enforce that? As an automaker with the kind of logistics that has your cars and your car parts available all over the globe. Someone can walk into a dealership in Turkey, say, and drive into Syria with it. Or buy one in Kentucky, soup it up and send it overseas for a private U.S. military contractor. We reached out to the company repeatedly.

But we never got someone to talk to us about why Toyota Hyluxes of a certain vintage are the vehicle of choice for military actors around. the world. And Chris, by the way, says that Toyota's never officially acknowledged his social media presence. But he does say that when he comes across the company's marketing team at conferences or expos, they give him friendly, knowing, hellos. So the Toyotas of war aren't going anywhere. Unless they just go out of style. Toyota technicals have been at the tip of the spear in our complex warfare ecosystem for decades now. So we asked Ed Nash what the future of this stuff might look like. Funny enough, you're probably going to see the technical become less relevant now.

Because as I say, it is generally favored by low technology non-state actors or low-grade militaries. But the counter to a technical in a lot of ways is something with greater mobility. And what we're seeing now is drones. Civilian drones, which are armed or either with the explosive warhead or dropping explosive warheads, that's a great counter to a technical. It's super cheap, super simple to get, super simple to operate. So maybe the 1980s and 90s Toyota Hylux trucks, which have lasted long past their assumed expiration date, will finally stop running. Maybe.

Long after our reporting on this story was mostly done, I was telling a friend about it, far from any kind of battle lines, here in Massachusetts. I figured he was a truck lover, so I thought he might know something about the highlights. He did. A lot of one-ton trucks still have leaf springs in the back, but coils in the front. In fact, he was just as obsessed as the other guys we talked to. So I met him in his workshop, where on the metal lockers used to store his tools for working on the near- 20 vehicles parked around his property,

Benjamin Freed of Barry, Massachusetts, had pinned up an old wedding announcement. And you and Becker is sitting on the back of a truck. A 1982 Toyota Hylux. No way. Yeah. For real? Yeah.

Benjamin told us he has 4.5 Hyluxes in various states sitting around his property. One died while he was testing it back in the woods behind his house last summer, so he's waiting for the snow to melt to get it out. Benjamin loves Toyota's. His day job is as a mechanical engineer, but he's been building and rebuilding Toyota trucks

since he was in high school. But always dreamed of having a hylix. Now that he's got 4.5 hyluxes, he spends his free time working on them. He actually invented his own perfected version. It doesn't have body armor or bullet holes in it. He calls it the high runner. It's a high luxe fused with a forerunner.

I know my cars. But Benjamin really knows his trucks. They have pretty strong, fully boxed frame construction. This one is a 22R, which means it's carbureated. Yeah, they seem a little overbuilt. The Hylux also had leaf strings. Standing out in the frozen, crusted Massachusetts snow, next to a Hylux with a battered paint job and no seat in the cab,

far from direct military conflict, Benjamin's Highlux life is pretty peaceful. And yet, he says the same thing everyone says. Everybody tends to like Toyotas for the same reason. Aside from aesthetics, they're probably not doing it for aesthetics in the same way I am to some degree, but they're easy to work on, they're reliable. They can take a lot of abuse without breaking. This is not a car commercial, or a Hylux-themed YouTube channel.

It is a reminder that there's a huge difference between what we're told, bigger is better, tough is powerful. The higher the grill, the bigger the thrill. And what at the end of the day is what we want. Maybe the little boxy 40-year-old pickup is actually what we're looking for. But considering the Toyota high-lux mythology online, we still needed proof up close. And finally, with Benjamin's help, we got it. What are you doing?

Putting a little bit of gas in the carburetor. I've never seen somebody put gas in a carburetor, but I don't really know anything about anything. So... Here we go, round two. Okay. Come on, big money, no whamies. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston.

This episode was written by Ben Brock Johnson. It was produced by Dean Russell, and it was co-hosted by me, Amory Severson, And me, Ben Brock Johnson. Our episode was edited by Meg Kramer, sound designed by our production manager, Paul Vikas. The rest of our team is Frannie Monaghan, Grace Tatter, Caitlin Harup, and Emily Jenkowski. Our managing producer is Summata Joshi. Endless Threat is a show about the blurred lines between online communities and a building that was demolished for a TV show. And just a reminder, we are still working on an upcoming episode about how people are used. using AI in their relationships. So not just like I made myself an AI girlfriend because we made that episode already. We're talking, you know, how AI is playing into your work relationships, your friend

relationships, relationships with your family, your parents, those kinds of things. So send us a voice memo or you can send a written message to endless thread at wbUR.org. If you have an untold history, an unsolved mystery, or another wild story from the internet that you want us to tell, Hit us up, endless thread again at wbUR.org.