In today’s car market, any cushy monocoque crossover is guaranteed to set even the most stagnant sales charts moving. Toyota Highlander, despite its late arrival to our market, did accelerate the sales and now here is a new one. The 2023 Toyota Highlander arrives with more tech and a more powerful engine.
Toyota’s SUV line-up in the GCC is already crowded, with every niche filled with a model or two, mostly with offerings built in the Far East. However, Toyota offers a completely different set of SUVs in the West, such as the C-HR, the Highlander and the 4Runner, which fill segments in North America that are already taken here. So as a compromise, Toyota is now offering hybrid versions of some of those SUVs in the Middle East, as a way to differentiate them from existing offerings here. First came the C-HR HEV (while killing off the short-lived Prius here), and now the Highlander HEV has debuted in UAE and Saudi Arabia.