The era of luxury apartment grey is so over. You know what I’m talking about — those laminate plank floors. While the past few years have thrown words like “demure” and “mindful” at us, it seems like maximalism is finally making a comeback. It’s time for noisy music, flash photography, and oh yes, bright colors to return. In that vein, Toyota’s TRD Pro Tacoma, 4Runner, Tundra, and Sequoia are getting a new Wave Maker color for the 2026 model year, and trust me, you aren’t going to be able to ignore it.
The TRD Pro line has previously offered some bold colors like the intensely saturated Voodoo Blue, the electric Lime Rush, and the bright Solar Octane, but things have gone muted over the past few years. The red-brown of 2024’s Terra looks like viewing lava in a solar eclipse, and 2025’s Mudbath is far more demure, largely because it’s less saturated than the Quicksand color that was popular on the old Tacoma. It’s time things flipped back to bright, and Wave Maker is bright indeed.
Forget mere blue, Wave Maker is pretty much cyan, and it rules. It looks even more vibrant than the Blue Vector color available on last year’s Lexus IS 500, and you already needed sunglasses to look at that car in the sunlight. Like blue raspberry or blue cotton candy, this new color is the sort of blue that feels engineered in the best way possible.
Of course, new highlight colors often come with interesting designer speak attached, and Wave Runner elicited an amusing quote from CALTY Ann Arbor general manager Benjamin Jiminez: “With Wave Maker, we were inspired by unexplored areas of adventure including extreme territory and even beyond earth.” Beyond earth? Correct me if I’m wrong, but the planet most similar to Wave Runner in color is Uranus, a celestial body impossible to talk about with any sort of maturity. If that’s part of the inspiration, I can understand the somewhat unusual phrasing.
Perhaps best of all, because Wave Maker is a TRD Pro truck and SUV exclusive, you’re going to get a lot of it, should you tick the option box. A Tacoma already isn’t exactly small, but just imagine seeing a Wave Maker Sequoia in person. That’s a whole lot of this color in one place, a rolling billboard for making interesting and exciting choices.
We’ll have to wait until autumn for Wave Maker to start showing up on the 2026 TRD Pro models, and while it seems like a summer color, maybe the timing works because this hue also seems like it could fight back a little against seasonal depression. Even under the overcast skies in some press photos, it’s still megawatt material. Anyway, kudos to Toyota for trying a bright color again. While we do wish for greater availability, it’s possible the color grows popular enough to breach TRD Pro containment. After all, Inferno was a TRD Pro color before it spread to other Toyota models.
Top graphic credit: Toyota/smurf.com
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