Street truck fans know about the legendary Ram SRT-10, a 10,046-unit run of 10-cylinder muscle machines, cranking out 500 horsepower from an 8.3-liter Viper V10 engine. Meanwhile, many people don’t know that Toyota built a competitor to the mean Ram with its relatively unknown supercharged 2008 TRD Tundra.
Believe it or not, the Toyota pickup actually beats the Ram by four horses, at 504 hp. However, the supercharger was only available as a dealer-installed option, making the suped-up 2008-2015 Tundra considerably scarcer than the 10-cylinder Ram. Here’s what you need to know about this rare muscle truck.
The Supercharger Added 123 Horsepower To The TRD Tundra
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The second-gen Tundra was only a year into its 2007 relaunch when Toyota started offering an optional supercharger upgrade for trucks equipped with a 5.7-liter V8 engine. This brought the modest 381-hp powertrain up to a ridiculous 504-hp rating.
A 2008 Toyota Tundra with the stock 5.7-liter V8 can hit 60 mph in around 6.5 seconds, at best. With a supercharger, reaching 60 mph in 4.5 seconds is totally reasonable, depending on the configuration.
A fully decked-out rear-wheel-drive Tundra with a two-door Regular Cab body saw the base MSRP of $24,380 climbing to more than $45,000 after installing all the TRD upgrades and a $5,875 Eaton TVS Roots-type supercharger. In 2026 dollars, the truck would cost around $69,000. The improvements included the following.
- TRD dual exhaust
- TRD brake kit
- TRD rear anti-sway bar
- Lowered TRD suspension
- TRD polished aluminum wheels
TRD’s suspension kit dropped the 2008 Tundra’s imposing 10.2-inch minimum ground clearance by two inches in the front and four inches in the back, creating a meaner stance to fit with the look of street trucks of the day. The setup also provided better handling and less body roll on tight turns.
Reviewers who were lucky enough to test-drive this beast when it was brand new reported a bit of a “bat outta heck” feel, with braking that didn’t quite stop on a dime and a high-in-the-saddle driver position that felt unwieldy in such a fast vehicle. The supercharged TRD Tundra was, and is, a beast, proudly packing more power than you need in a Tundra, making it Toyota’s answer to unruly old-school muscle cars.
The Supercharger Was Offered From 2008 To 2015
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The supercharger itself utilized a twin four-lobe rotor setup, like the layout also in the C7 Corvette ZR1 and the Cadillac CTS-V. The supercharger was officially discontinued in 2015, making the 2015 model the last official version of the truck. When the kit was new, the deal-installed modifications came with an official TRD ECU reflash and wouldn’t void your warranty.
However, some buyers today might not care about having an “official” version of this truck. The parts are out there to build your own TRD supercharged Tundra. At this point, all the trucks are old enough to be long out of their powertrain warranty.
Supercharged Tundras Rarely Hit The Auction Block
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Don’t hold your breath waiting for an original, dealer-built supercharged TRD Tundra to go up for auction. The most recent listing we could find closed in 2024, and we’d have to go back to 2022 to find another recent-ish sale. We scoured the web and found only two instances.
- A 2008 model with 90,000 miles sold for $28,800 in 2024.
- A 95,000-mile 2012 model sold for $25,250 in 2022.
To be clear, it’s not hard to find a Toyota Tundra with a supercharger attached. But most listings aren’t for the original dealer-built TRD models.
You might get the same performance numbers from a dealer-built or aftermarket supercharged Tundra, but the official TRD models are a special piece of automotive history.
There Are Plenty Of Unofficial Supercharged Tundras Out There
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If you want to find out how many of these trucks were built in total, you’re out of luck. Supercharged TRD Tundras weren’t tracked by serial number by the automaker. Toyota has no idea how many customers paid their dealer to install the TRD kit. The only way to find out would be to call every Toyota dealer in the country, ask, and hope they’ve kept the records for over a decade.
We can assume that this was a rare upsell. Toyota sold anywhere from 79,000 to 196,000 Tundras each year from 2008 to 2015, moving about 110,000 to 120,000 units most years in that stretch. There’s no way to know how many of those were supercharged, but judging how often provable original examples come up for sale, the figure could be fewer than 1,000 examples. The figure is purely an estimate; if you could prove dealers never sold more than a couple dozen in total, we also wouldn’t be surprised.
Aftermarket supercharged Tundras often sell for more than the real-deal examples, according to our research. If you find one, factors like mileage and condition can play a significant role in a truck’s value.
You’re Better Off Building Your Own Super Tundra
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You’ll have an easier time hunting down individual owners and making them an offer than waiting for these trucks to go up for sale. The people who own them don’t seem all that eager to let them go, and there aren’t that many people who own them.
Thankfully, the components to build one yourself aren’t hard to find. The CarBuzz Marketplace tool currently shows a 5.7-liter V8-powered 2012 Toyota Tundra trending at $15,769 from an MSRP of $30,350. We can go all out with performance suspension and upgraded brakes to build the ultimate street truck, but the supercharger kit alone can cost $5,000 to $9,000, bringing us to over 500 hp in the $20,000 to $25,000 range.
Magnuson sells a popular 5.7-liter supercharger system for $8,295, which promises 560 hp and 563 lb-ft of torque with a simple bolt-on install. The kit utilizes Eaton TVS Technology with the same four-lobe design as the original supercharger, and it even comes with a three-year warranty, which is more protection than you’d get buying an original supercharged Tundra a decade out of warranty.
You Can DIY The Job, With The Right Tools And Some Space To Work
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If you plan to install the kit yourself, the installation is moderately difficult. The bolt-on kit is fairly plug-and-play, but you’d need the equipment to flash the revised ECU tune or find a technician to do it. If you have a friend who’s familiar with this kind of work, see if they’re willing to lend a hand. Otherwise, plenty of YouTube tutorials can help you install the kit.
Owners report that reversing the process and returning the truck to stock is totally possible (if not exactly easy), so you can consider this to be a fairly low-risk project as long as you know your way around under the hood of a pickup.
Checking the market for aftermarket supercharged Tundras, we found a 42,000-mile 2017 Limited that sold for $33,000 earlier this year, and a 2020 1794 Edition selling for $46,750 with 37,000 miles on the odometer. This shows you can save money building your own supercharged Tundra than you would by buying a pickup that’s already had the work done.
Even if you don’t know a socket wrench from a sock monkey, the cost of buying the kit and hiring a pro to install it will likely come out to far less than you’d spend on a pre-built model.
Is The Supercharged TRD Tundra Worth A Buy?
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If you’ve got $25,000 to spend on a performance truck, and if you’re lucky enough to find one of these for sale, our advice would be to go ahead and buy it. This is a unique piece of Toyota history, and you can guarantee you’ll be driving a pickup unlike anything else on your block, or likely in your state, for that matter, given this truck’s remarkable scarcity.
Sources: Toyota, Magnuson.
