Autobayng News Team
Hidden in the console of an unassuming 1980s Toyota Van sat a chilled box with a freezer section and trays that made real ice cubes
8 hours ago
by Brad Anderson
- Toyota’s Cool & Hot Box was offered as an option on the LiteAce.
- Refrigerant lines from the dual A/C system chilled the ice trays.
- America lost the option, but Europe’s Previa carried it forward.
While Toyota has long carried a strong reputation for quality and reliability, plenty of people still write its cars off as bland, boring, or uninspired. It’s had its misses, like any brand, but it has also built genuine icons and introduced technologies that pushed the whole industry forward. The classic Toyota Van, sold officially as the LiteAce, came with a few particularly interesting features, though one of them never really caught on.
Also: This 1984 Oldsmobile Had Three Shifters For One Automatic Transmission
Originally built between 1984 and the early 1990s, the classic family-focused van could be optioned with something you won’t even find in a current Rolls-Royce, Mercedes-Maybach, or any of those fancy new EVs coming out of China. Not only could the Van be configured with a refrigerator, but it also included an ice maker. Yep, just like your freezer at home, dropped into a minivan.
Toyota labeled the refrigerator a ‘Cool & Hot Box’ and positioned it in a console between the front seats. It was large enough to hold six cans of drink and included a dedicated freezer section, complete with a pair of ice trays that filled with water and froze quickly. Cooling the ice-making area were refrigerant lines from the dual air-conditioning system, itself an optional extra.
Is It Useful or Useless?
Why would you need an ice maker in your car? Well, that’s a very good question. During normal, everyday driving duties, it doesn’t seem particularly useful, and we suspect many owners probably didn’t use this feature all too often. It could perhaps be somewhat useful for those who use their Toyota Vans for long road trips with the family and want to sit back and relax with an icy drink.
Read: Here’s How A Toyota Van From The 90s Instigated The Death Of The Sedan
It’s understood that Toyota dropped the Cool & Hot Box option in the US once the LiteAce gave way to the Previa, though buyers in other markets, Canada and Japan among them, could still get the same unit on that model, ice maker included. There it was reserved for higher trims, which is why the surviving examples have become something of a collector’s item. Previa owners now hunt them down in junkyards and pay real money for the privilege, with original front-console fridge boxes shipped over from Japan changing hands for a few hundred dollars apiece.
