N70 Hilux Upgrades: The Interior Guide for Australia's Favourite Workhorse

The N70 Hilux is one of the most trusted utes Australia has ever bought. From 2005 through to 2015 it hauled tools, towed floats and crossed deserts, and the KUN26 3.0 litre turbo diesel earned a reputation for going around the clock twice. Plenty are still doing exactly that. The cabin is the part that dates: what felt fine in 2011 feels bare now, and a ute you'll keep another decade deserves better than a worn urethane wheel and a blank switch panel.

The N70 takes a handful of interior upgrades better than almost any ute of its era. Here's where your money actually shows.

Start with the steering wheel

Nothing dates an N70 cabin faster than the original wheel. Ten-plus years of sun and hands polish the factory urethane smooth, and by now most are shiny in a way no detailer can fix. It's the control you touch most, so a wheel swap changes how the whole vehicle feels far more than the spend suggests.

PVS builds steering wheel cores for the N70 facelift (06/2011 to 04/2015) in four finishes: the Classic Carbon with perforated leather sides, and Limited Edition perforated leather wheels in Graphite, Red and White. Your factory airbag and steering wheel buttons carry straight across, so the vehicle looks factory-plus rather than modified. The wheel core is covered by a lifetime warranty.

The 300 Series style kit for the whole N70 run

The cores above suit the facelift. There's now a complete kit that fits every N70 built from 2005 to 2015: the N70 Hilux Steering Wheel Upgrade Kit. The wheel is the 300 Series design, the flat-bottom shape taken from the newest LandCruiser, and it mounts to your factory airbag hub, so an N70 needs no boss kit. Four styles, Classic, Sports, Carbon Fibre and Forged Carbon Fibre, each in grey or black leather.

It comes in two versions, and the one you want depends on what's on your current wheel.

• Factory Controls, for an N70 whose wheel already has buttons. The 12 to 10 pin adaptor the N70 clock spring needs is in the box, and your factory cruise and audio buttons carry straight over to the new wheel. From $1,018.
• No Controls, for an N70 with a bare wheel and no buttons at all. This version includes a wireless controls module matched to your head unit, whether that's the factory Toyota radio, an Alpine, a Pioneer, Kenwood, Sony or JVC, or an Android unit from PVS, Polaris or Aerpro. From $1,149.

The wireless module puts head unit functions on the wheel: volume, track skip, source and phone. It doesn't add cruise control to a ute that never had it. That's a separate job and a separate kit, covered next.

Every wheel is ADR certified by ADR Compliance Services. The wheel core and the module electronics are covered by a lifetime warranty.

Add cruise control

Many N70s, particularly Workmate and SR grades, never came with cruise control. Anyone who has driven the Hume or the Bruce holding a throttle steady for four hours knows what that costs you. The PVS cruise control kit for the N70 adds it with a factory-style control, so long highway legs stop being an endurance event and your speed stops drifting on you.

Sort the switch panel

Most working N70s have grown a beard of mismatched aftermarket switches: a carling here, a round toggle there, something zip-tied under the dash for the light bar. PVS makes per-function LED push switches that fit the Toyota switch blanks, with dedicated legends for driving lights, fridges, air compressors, reverse cameras, inverters, battery isolators and dozens of other functions. Your accessory setup then reads like it left the factory that way.

Bring the audio into this decade

The N70 facelift's factory head unit was competent for its time, but its time was 2011. If you've already fitted a modern unit, the PVS audio USB switch interface tidies the connection into your dash properly. Beyond that, the honest advice for an N70 is simple: decent speakers and a layer of sound deadening in the doors change a diesel ute cabin more than any screen will, because the KUN26 was never shy about making itself heard.

Why the N70 is worth spending on

Used N70 prices have held firm for years, and for good reason: they're simpler than the utes that replaced them, cheap to service, and mechanically close to unkillable. That's exactly why upgrading one adds up. A few thousand dollars spent inside the cabin buys a vehicle that feels current to live with, on a platform you already trust, for a fraction of the cost of changing over to something newer with none of the history.

Give the interior the same attention your mechanicals have had, and your N70 stays a genuinely pleasant place to spend a workday, not just a reliable one.