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The day Toyota relies on GM for LC engines is the post-build-date I stop buying LCs.
On the other hand...if TOYOTA ever DID do that for a Cruiser engine? -It would mean GM is kicking some serious reliability butt...
Say what you will about many aspects of GM that are sub-par (interiors probably being chief among their many defects) - but V8s are easily the thing they're BEST at, and in that regard they really are top-tier. Most GM V8s last just as long as their Toyota counterparts.
Take a look at the LTRI rankings for the Tahoe versus the Land Cruiser -
The Tahoe and the LC are no more than 1.5% apart in terms of incident occurrence across drivetrain, transmission, and engine issues, and of course the LC leads the rankings - probably why many of us are here - but the GM trucks are very good overall.
The Gen III/IV/V GM V8s have some really good things going for them. Consider that even at the very beginning of the contemporary comparable motors, GM was on to something: the LS1's first introduction was in the 1997 Vette, and with 5.7L it made 345hp and 350tq in an aluminum cam-in-block package that only weighs about 450 lbs fully dressed. Meanwhile the best contemporary offering from Toyota - '98 LC100's 2UZ-FE - at 4.7L made only 230hp and 302tq at introduction, and with its iron block weighed at least 550 lbs.
If we're talking truck to truck, GM went on to introduce many variants in both iron and aluminum block 4.8L, 5.3, and 6.0L engines in their "gen III" era (~97-07), and then in gen 4 (07-14 or so) also added 6.2L offerings that maintained similar levels of competitiveness in terms of output while also being very reliable overall. I believe the same displacements exist in the latest (2014+) GenV stuff.
Other things to think about - dimensionally a DOHC Toyota engine is huge compared to virtually any small-block LS variant, and thus they have ended up installed into virtually any car or truck you can think of in the aftermarket. Go poke your head into the 80 series section and take a look at the stickied thread on V8 swaps, while paying attention to how many (most?) of them are for GM V8s. The flexibility of the LS platform has seen the aftermarket respond in turn with a ridiculous amount of support for the LS that's frankly unparalleled. Unfortunately the same can't be said for the Toyota V8s.
I imagine that in terms of actual architectural proliferation, there are many multiples of the LS variants on the road today versus the Toyota V8s - millions of both iron and aluminum block variants even from the earliest runs on the roads still with similar mileage counts to what we have seen out of the 2UZ-FE and 3UR-FE.
TL;DR - feel free to knock GM for the many dumb things that they do, but their V8s are the last thing to pick on.
