30 November 2020 by Marcus Craft
Toyota’s HiLux has had a passionate legion of fans for a long time – but it has also attracted a fair few naysayers through the years. The brand’s ongoing woes with DPF (diesel particulate filter) strife have only emboldened those negative voices, but those same woes don't seem to have impacted the...Read more
23 November 2020 by Marcus Craft
Toyota’s 4WDs have a sterling reputation as off-road touring vehicles. But while the brand’s top-sellers like the 200 Series LandCruiser and the HiLux get all the adulation, the mid-size Prado simply goes about its business of being a decent all-rounder with little fuss or fanfare. However, it’s...Read more
11 November 2020 by Brendan Batty
Signature Campers is one of the newer players on the market. It launched around 2017 specialising in compact expedition trailers, but quickly found a need for larger, more comfort-orientated forward-fold campers. Mark Nesbit, who had turned up to buy just one camper trailer, recently bought the...Read more
9 November 2020 by Marcus Craft
If you’re a fan of the VW Touareg and you want a little more off-road action from your vehicle of choice, perhaps the new limited edition Adventure variant is right up your dirt track. Be warned though: there are only 150 available, so fight it out among yourselves. The more notable features of the...Read more
9 November 2020 by Brendan Batty
A plastic trailer might not seem like the most obvious solution to a problem, but for the last decade, Stockman has been doing just that to make off-road trailers lighter. Weighing as little as 200kg for the simplest model, the Pod Trailers are made in Australia from recycled plastic on galvanised-...Read more
4 November 2020 by Brendan Batty
When Cub Campers first released the Frontier in 2018, its first forward-fold camper trailer, it was almost in a league of its own. The only other camper trailer with a vaguely similar concept was the Ultimate Camper, but Ultimate barely innovated in 20 years, and so there’s little surprise the...Read more
4 November 2020 by Brendan Batty
The Weekender is one of the smallest rear-fold camper trailers on the market, on purpose. In almost a whole industry, which is focussed on being bigger, badder and more off-road-suited, the Cub Weekender is not. Instead, Cub specifically designed it for solo or couple travellers who just want to...Read more
4 November 2020 by Brendan Batty
As the market for caravanning and camping has grown, so too has the opportunity for more niche products to evolve. Where the market, just five years ago, was dominated by the choice between hard-floor or soft-floor campers, today, imagination is the only limiting factor in trailer design or...Read more
3 November 2020 by Brendan Batty
Track, the company behind the Tvan, has always been ahead of the trends. Its Tvan, now 21 years old, combined a ‘space-age’ tear-drop concept with a suspension system developed for the military that was worlds ahead of the primitive independent suspension systems of its time. In 2008 it was one of...Read more
27 October 2020 by David Morley
Nissan's GQ Patrol was around in Australia from the late 1980s to the end of the '90s. Tough, no-nonsense, and highly capable off-road it's getting rarer, but remains a firm favourite in the second-hand market.Read more
21 October 2020 by David Morley
Toyota's LandCruiser 200-Series tends to steal the limelight as a second-hand, seven-seat, off-road SUV buy. But Nissan's V8-engined Y62 Patrol has a lot to offer.Read more
20 October 2020 by Marcus Craft
The new Mazda BT-50 is no longer based on the Ford Ranger platform; it is now based on the all-new Isuzu D-Max. So, a pretty big change, to say the least. Among other things, the new Mazda ute has a new look – moving even further away from the polarising exterior of past BT-50s – and it has a new...Read more
16 October 2020 by David Morley
Like other Japanese car makers post WW2, Nissan decided to take a...Read more
15 October 2020 by David Morley
The MQ Patrol was a real watershed model for Nissan (or Datsun as it...Read more
9 October 2020 by David Morley
Nissan’s GU (Y61) Patrol was on sale for an awfully long time even by...Read more
9 October 2020 by David Morley
There was a time when the short-wheelbase versions of the Nissan Patrol...Read more
28 September 2020 by Marcus Craft
The Nissan Y62 Series 5 Patrol has long been considered a real adventure machine, a large 4WD wagon with a rock-solid rep, and the capability to tackle tough terrain. It had been in a long-time tussle with the Toyota LandCruiser for large SUV supremacy in Australia’s – but that all changed when the...Read more
22 September 2020 by Marcus Craft
The Toyota Fortuner has always been a solid seven-seat 4WD, but this ute-based wagon has never reached anywhere near the sale heights of Toyota’s LandCruiser, Prado and HiLux. Well, the new-generation Fortuner is here and it has revised styling, more power and torque, increased towing capacity,...Read more
16 September 2020 by Marcus Craft
Toyota's Landcruiser 76 Series wagon occupies a small, very specific niche all of its own: it's very capable off-road but it's not pretty, it's not that comfortable, it drives like a truck, and it offers few, if any, real concessions to occupant safety. However, I reckon those characteristics are...Read more
3 September 2020 by Marcus Craft
This is the new D-Max – and when I say 'new' – I mean it. It has a new exterior, a new reengineered engine – producing more power and more torque than the previous-generation D-Max – and it now has a rear diff lock... and that's a new and much-needed addition! The new D-Max officially went on-sale...Read more