There’s been no shortage of complaints about the sixth-generation Toyota 4Runner’s 2.4-liter T24A-FTS turbo I4. We get it, it’s hard to beat the grunt of a good ol’fashioned V6. But the 4.0-liter 1GR-FE V6’s 15-year run had come to an end, and it was time for the Yota to embrace a more advanced powerplant. And the turbo four-banger does have potential beyond its factory 278 horsepower, thanks to a Cobb Accessport.
The 2024-2025 Toyota 4Runner just got a serious kick in the pants with tunes for 87-, 91-, and 93-octane from Cobb. If you’ve never used an Accessport, it’s an easy-to-use handheld tuner that Cobb preloads with its in-house developed tunes. These are calibrations developed on its own in-house vehicles on its dyno through hundreds of hours, and carry CARB EO numbers to be 50-state legal. Yes, you heard that right…that’s because the tunes are actually cleaner and more efficient than the factory tune.
We sat down with Tim Bailey, PhD, Cobb’s Senior Calibrator, who explained the amount of control its software offers to improve the performance of the engine and transmission. For grocery store runs or off-roading, you can dial in a completely different calibration of boost and timing maps, along with shift points to be more or less aggressive depending on your needs. This vastly improves the driving experience, not just what a dyno reads. That said, the dyno testing shows gains literally across the board from Cobb’s tuning on the 2024-2025 4Runner.
“From memory, this makes about 40 foot-pounds of torque and about 35 horsepower,” Bailey recalled. “And the gains are across the entire RPM range. It’s really usable power. Not only do we have different engine tunes for different octanes, but we have different transmission tunes – the shift points and the torque converter lock-up, that changes the way the truck feels.”
“We use the factory strategy to ask it to make more torque based on where your foot is [on the accelerator pedal]. It makes a little more boost, about 3.5 pounds in the mid-range, 2.5 at higher RPM; that makes the extra torque. We are also optimizing ignition timing, which determines how much torque you create during combustion. We didn’t touch air/fuel ratios. The engine is still extremely efficient; in fact, our calibrations perform better on an emissions dyno than the stock calibration.”
The cool part is that these base calibrations are just the tip of the iceberg for the Cobb Accessport. If you plan to get crazy later, you can continue to use the handheld device as your interface for any custom calibrations from a Cobb-authorized tuner. It can store those additional calibrations for E85 or a larger turbo, for example.
We don’t know about you, but after seeing the gains on the Cobb tune, we’ll definitely give the sixth-generation 4Runner a second look. It’s hard to keep us away from a Yota.
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