“Nice minivan.” Those 2 words can crush any off-roader’s soul. If you hear that at the top of a rocky pass in Colorado, from a Jeeper, that might even be enough to make you re-think your rig choice entirely. Or maybe he’s mistaken? What on the surface looks like your grandma’s SUV, with a bunch of bulbous plastic, marshmallowy car tires, and fancy wood trim inside might be hiding more underneath.

While the FJ Cruiser and 4Runner are the more obvious first choice if you want to build a Toyota SUV, the Lexus GX470 brings a lot to the table too. With a silky smooth 32 valve V8 under the hood, the same proven independent suspension introduced on the Tacoma, and a linked rear end, it certainly checks the right boxes on paper. It also adds a further level of comfort over the base Toyota platform, as Lexus is known first and foremost for building some of the nicest places on 4 wheels to park your bottom.

Not wanting to run the risk of ever being mistaken for a minivan in the Starbucks drive through ever again, the call was made to ‘go for it’. Being that the vehicle already had 120k on the clock, most of the suspension parts were ready for a refresh anyway, and with the main achilles heel of the GX platform being its expensive adjustable dampers and air suspension, we know this would be an easy transition to make. A full Stage 8 kit was put together with some small variations. The rear shocks were substituted for Omega bypasses, the Stage 3 S2 front bypass package added, and the remote reservoir coilovers were swapped for internal reservoir coilovers to keep packaging simpler and cleaner.

The end goal of the build was a vehicle that could easily swallow a couple thousand road miles, while giving up nothing in performance when the pavement disappears. Living on the California Central Coast has a lot to offer, but sweeping Rocky Mountain alpine vistas, the remote missions and fishing villages of Baja, and the dense forests of the Pacific North West are all more than a little hop, skip, jump away. We knew starting with a comfortable platform from the get go would put us a step ahead, as the suspension wouldn’t be stock for long.

Since this build started with about 125k already on the clock, we knew the control arms could use a refresh. Aluminum arms were chosen for a few reasons, mainly their resistance to corrosion. Icon uses a double adjuster sleeve in their control arms to facilitate easy, on vehicle adjustments. Icon specs all FK brand, JM series rod ends in their arms with teflon lines, which are one of the highest grade rod ends available. By using a high quality teflon lined heim joint, most of the negatives attributes like noise and quick wear, are negated.