The 2026 Toyota Tacoma: Canada Gets One Body Style, a Manual Gearbox, and a Hybrid That Tows Less Than the Gas Truck — Rated 7.5/10

The Canadian Tacoma is a narrower proposition than the American one, and that is the first thing a shopper should understand. Every Tacoma sold here is a four-wheel-drive Double Cab with five seats. There is no base SR, no XtraCab, and no two-wheel-drive version at any price. What Canada loses in configurations it partly regains elsewhere — the six-speed manual gearbox, increasingly rare in this segment, is offered here.

Pricing is unusually transparent by the standards of this class. The gasoline automatic opens at $52,021 for an SR5 with the six-foot bed; the manual starts at $53,596 in TRD Off Road trim with the five-foot bed; the i-FORCE MAX hybrid begins at $68,441 as a Limited. Those figures already contain $2,083.92 in fees, which Toyota itemises down to the cent: $1,930 for delivery and destination, $100 for air conditioning, $22 for OMVIC, $30 for the tire levy and $1.92 in environmental handling. Unlike some rivals, Toyota does not quietly net out incentives to make the headline number smaller.

Three powertrains share one turbocharged 2.4-litre four-cylinder. In gasoline automatic form it makes 278 horsepower and 317 pound-feet. The manual version is detuned slightly to 270 and 310. The i-FORCE MAX hybrid lifts output to 326 horsepower and 465 pound-feet, comfortably the strongest engine in the range.

It is not, however, the most capable one, and that is the sort of detail a spec sheet reveals and a brochure does not. The gasoline trucks tow up to 6,400 pounds; the hybrids top out at 6,000, and the Trailhunter at 5,950. A buyer choosing the hybrid for its extra 48 horsepower gives up 400 pounds of towing to get it. The hybrid does win on payload, at 1,705 pounds, and on fuel, at 10.0 to 10.3 litres per 100 kilometres combined against 11.2 to 11.4 for the gasoline automatic and 11.9 for the manual.

Fourteen packages fill the Canadian range. The gasoline automatics run SR5, SR5+, TRD Sport, TRD Sport+, TRD Sport Premium, TRD Off Road, TRD Off Road+ and TRD Off Road Premium. The manual is offered in two: TRD Off Road and TRD Sport+, both with the five-foot bed. The hybrids number four — Limited, TRD Off Road Premium, and the two halo trucks.

Those halo trucks are hybrid-only here, and both are seriously equipped. The TRD Pro brings IsoDynamic Performance front seats with built-in shock absorption, FOX shocks with three manually selectable damping settings, a disconnecting front stabilizer bar, Crawl Control, Multi-Terrain Select, a locking rear differential and 33-inch Goodyear tires on 18-inch wheels. The Trailhunter takes a different tack, fitting Old Man Emu shocks, an ARB steel rear bumper with recovery points, an onboard air compressor, a high-mount air intake, hot-stamped steel skid plates and a bed utility bar with removable MOLLE panels. The regular TRD Off Road runs Bilstein dampers.

Toyota Safety Sense 3.0 is standard across the range, bringing pre-collision braking, lane departure alert, lane tracing assist and full-speed-range radar cruise control. Infotainment runs on an eight-inch screen lower down and a fourteen-inch one above, with wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto throughout; the SR5's instrument display is a seven-inch unit, with a head-up display and digital rear-view mirror available further up the range.

A 7.5/10 from the Torbrook Rating Agency reflects a truck with real off-road hardware and an unusually honest price, sold in Canada as a single configuration with one notable powertrain trade-off buried in the towing figures. The specifications above are Toyota's; the score is ours.