2020 Isuzu D-Max vs 2021

What's the difference?

For those Spartans looking for a rugged, no-nonsense workhorse, the D-Max SX will do exactly what it says on the tin. Those people will love its breadth of capability.

For modern folk looking for a workhorse they can also live with in relative comfort (as is demanded of many of today’s trucks), there are better equipped, safer options out there. Technology and safety have simply moved on since this truck represented the status quo.

The D-Max is much better than it’s ever been. In the realm of space cab ute variants, which are traditionally engineered for job-site duties with few concessions to comfort and safety, the D-Max has moved the whole market forward a great deal – if it’s not the king of these work utes, it’s pretty bloody close.

Even in space-cab form, this is a nice-driving utility and as a daily vehicle of choice, it’s not an unpleasant option. It’s still a purpose-built work vehicle, sure, and in space-cab guise it is comfortably so, but it’s so good in most other respects that it effectively shrugs off any job-site shackles and offers a formidable proposition as a work-and-play all-rounder for perhaps a couple and their dogs.

The D-Max SX has the visual flair of any other truck in this class – an anonymous aura that says “my driver is wearing hi-vis” or “Yes! I am allowed to park on this side of the traffic cones."

It has dated though over the nine years since this generation first appeared, and even as a Hi-Ride perhaps doesn't have the same presence as the fresher HiLux or Ranger in similar trim.

It’s not overtly ugly and should blend in easily on a work site. Suffice to say, a few inevitable bumps and scratches won’t be noticed as much as they would be on something glitzier.

Inside is basic. Perhaps too basic, with an abundance of thin, cheap plastic panel work, distinct lack of padding anywhere, and just two colours – soft silver and grey.

The 7.0-inch touchscreen doesn’t add much to the equation, with the only available USB port awkwardly sticking out the front of it, and is even difficult to operate with no dials, just buttons that require jabbing.

Blank inserts in the door cards and centre console (where switches for higher grade equipment would go) confirm that you’re in the entry-level model.

It’s rugged though, and far from the premium territory some rivals are getting into with interiors so nice you’d feel bad about putting the truck to work.

The rear-hinged, clamshell rear doors which provide access to the rear part of the cabin are neatly hidden, open to a wide angle, and are easy to operate. So, points for that.

If you’re a fan of doing things the old, hard, and uncomfortable way. You’ll love it then. Spartan sums it up.

Plenty, if you get your jollies out of utes. And, admit, it, there are a fair few of us out there.

But let’s stick to the essentials.

This D-Max has the new-generation ‘double vampire fangs’ front end, which is a bit of a ‘like it or don’t like it’ kind of proposition. 

But it’s the rear on this D-Max that’s most interesting. Because rather than a tub/pick-up style back end, this D-Max has a heavy-duty alloy tray, which costs $2567 (RRP, including fitting). This tray is one of five available, including economy, general purpose, heavy duty (steel), and mine specification (steel).

This heavy duty tray has a built-in rear-window guard/protector and a top rail on the tray headboard that has a claimed 150kg load rating.

The cabin is, in keeping with the entry-entry-level SX mode, on the basic side of ‘basic’, lending itself appropriately to the rough and tumble of everyday life, including work and play.

The SX's stripped-back interior design means practicality is somewhat lacking.

It does have fold-away cupholders on either side of the dash, which are actually rare now because they limit the size of the cup they'll swallow.

There are decent cupholders in the centre console though, and a small trench which can fit a phone in front of the gearshift.

There’s a large armrest box and dual glove boxes on the passenger side, but just a small bottle holder and no storage bins in the door that you tend to get with more recent designs.

The front seats appear basic, but proved comfortable, even on a four-hour freeway drive.

Then there’s the back seat. Like any of the Space Cab's current rivals, it’s a fold-up bench design which only has modest padding, and interesting ergonomics. I wouldn’t want to put anyone I liked back there for longer then about 10 minutes. Then again, who says you have to like your co-workers.

At 182cm tall, sitting behind my driving position, my knees were up against the front seatback, and I had to assume a rather uncomfortable angle when seated back there. You wouldn’t want to be any taller.

Fold the rear seat up and you're looking at pure, unadorned bodywork, but I suppose you could store a few small objects under there.

The rear windows pop open to allow for some airflow, but there are no adjustable air vents for rear passengers.

The Space Cab allows for a healthy tub tray length (1825mm versus the dual-cab’s 1625mm), and the optional roller cover proved handy during a rainy week.

If I was going to go full-on with the factory accessories (realizing that many of these SXs will have aftermarket trays) I’d be picking the full under rail tubliner ($716) rather than just a rubber mat.

A tow bar kit ($1098), electronic brake controller ($731), and 12-volt power outlets in the tray ($304 for one, $446 for two) are optionally available, but were not fitted to our test car.

Figures you’ll want to be aware of: The D-Max SX has a useful payload of 1084kg, unbraked towing capacity of 750kg, and 3500kg braked towing capacity (with corresponding 350kg towball download).

The SX cabin is a space well suited to work. It’s basic but without being spartan; it’s comfortable without being plush.

The flooring is vinyl, the seat trim is cloth, and there’s an abundance of hard plastics. All of that’s fine with me, but you may have a problem with the paucity of modern comforts and conveniences.

The 7.0-inch display is quite a bit smaller than the 9.0-inch unit that’s in some more expensive variants. It looks a bit odd, with such a thick border of ‘screen nothing’ around it, and it’s also fiddly to operate on the move.

Controls elsewhere are easy enough to use – temperature, fan direction and speed are all big dials – but there are a few dummy buttons around, just to rub in the fact that you’re not driving a higher-spec D-Max, as if you care.

In terms of storage there is a shallow tray in front of the shifter, cupholders between driver and front-seat passenger, a centre console, and pop-out cupholders under the outboard air vents.

There is a USB port and a 12V socket.

The rear wing doors allow for easy enough access – to throw in gear etc – and the rear bench has shallow storage spaces underneath.

The Isuzu D-Max SX space cab chassis 4x4 auto has a manufacturer suggested retail price (MSRP) of $45,700. SX is the entry-level spec for the D-Max line-up.

Standard features include 7.0-inch multimedia display (with Apple CarPlay (wireless) and Android Auto (USB) and voice recognition), halogen headlights, auto headlights and auto high-beam lights, auto wipers, tilt and reach adjustable steering, rear wing space cab doors, as well as 17-inch steel wheels, vinyl flooring, cloth seat trim, a reversing camera, and air-conditioning.

Safety gear is plentiful and includes eight airbags, AEB (with pedestrian and cyclist detection), lane keeping assistance, blind spot monitoring, rear cross traffic alert, front turn assist, driver attention assist. 

The D-max has a maximum five-star ANCAP crash-test safety rating.

Our test vehicle costs more than a standard example because it has the heavy-duty alloy tray ($2567, including fitting), towbar with seven-pin-plug ($1199, including fitting), and an electric brake controller ($820, including fitting). Isuzu calculates on-road costs (registration, CTP, stamp duty, delivery etc) to be $4309. So, the actual price as tested for this vehicle is $52,576, drive away.

Paint choices include Mineral White, Cobalt Blue mica, Basalt Black mica, Mercury Silver metallic, and Obsidian Grey mica. Any metallic paint option costs $500.
 

No matter which D-Max you choose, you’re getting just the one engine, the latest version of the brand’s hallowed (4JJ1) 3.0-litre four-cylinder turbo-diesel.

It produces nice power figures of 130kW/430Nm, and in High-Rider variants is only available with a six-speed torque converter automatic.

The SX does not get a low-range transfer case and is 4x2 (rear-wheel drive) in the configuration we tested.

This D-Max has the range’s new tweaked 3.0-litre four-cylinder turbo-diesel engine, which produces 140kW at 3600 rpm and 450Nm at 1600-2600rpm.

It has a six-speed automatic transmission and a dual-range transfer case with high- and low-range gearing. It also has a recalibrated off-road traction control system and – sound the trumpets! – a rear differential lock.

The official combined fuel figure is a surprisingly low  7.5L/100km for this configuration, and over a week of genuinely mixed conditions I recorded a figure of 10.9L/100km at the pump.

The D-Max is diesel only and has a 76-litre fuel tank.

It has a claimed fuel consumption of 8.0L/100km. The dash-indicated figure was 8.9L/100km, but I recorded an actual fuel consumption on test of 9.2L/100km.

The D-Max has a 76-litre fuel tank.

For all its workhorse brutality, I quite enjoyed driving the D-Max every time I got behind the wheel.

There’s a raw honesty about it, and while there are higher-tech engines out there, none quite compare to toughness this light truck powerplant exudes.

Power is plentiful, helped by the fact you’re only driving the rear wheels, and the six-speed transmission gets by without any major complains from this reviewer.

In some ways, simplicity is a better solution for work purposes than Ford’s high-tech and busy 10-speed that comes with in high-spec 2.0-litre Rangers.

It’s smart too, quickly (occasionally clunkily) shifting down when descending. A useful attribute for saving brake pads when you’re carrying things.

That said, this truck is hardly refined. The engine, with its huge cylinders, is unavoidably noisy, and for some reason High-Riders come with all-terrain tyres. I would swap these out for highway terrains if only commuting on tarmac. They’ll be quieter, save you a bit of wear, and might even reduce that fuel consumption figure.

The steering is heavy, requiring some genuine muscle to turn-in and the suspension proved to be a bit of a mixed bag.

It wasn’t as jarring around the rear as the HiLux can be unladen, but seemed to be quite firm, sometimes making for a jiggly, jolting ride on potholed roads.

What might get to you the most is the lack of padded interior surfaces. Would it hurt to give passengers a soft strip of polyurethane or padded synthetic for your elbows on either side? It’s a bit like riding inside a Lego brick on long journeys.

It’s actually pretty decent for an extra cab/space cab ute. Traditionally, these utes, in which the tray size is the priority over cabin space, have offered very average overall ride and handling, because they’ve simply not been set up to exhibit those characteristics. In the past, these utes have been engineered to handle large payloads comfortably, not to actually be comfortable.

Well, that’s changed quite dramatically with this latest revised D-Max line-up. The new dual-cab variants offer quite car-like on-road manners, and while the space cab has certainly improved over previous iterations, it’s not quite at car-like levels of driving assurance yet. But that’s the nature of the load-focussed beast, because it is on load-carrying leaf springs at the rear afterall.

There’s a fair bit of in-cabin noise, mostly diesel engine clatter, and the unladen space-cab D-Max yields a jittery ride, skipping around merrily as this ute traverses surfaces with even slight imperfections. 

But, as always, if you expect stable, composed ride and handling in an unladen ute that’s mostly a tray, then you ought to take a long hard look at yourself.

In most other aspects, this D-Max is right up there with the best in this realm, and you certainly can’t fault it in terms of what it offers in pure drivability, functionality and safety tech.

The D-Max range has achieved a maximum 5-star ANCAP safety rating in 2020. The line-up is one of the best-equipped ute ranges on the market.

Every D-Max has Isuzu's Intelligent Driver Assistance System (IDAS), which includes such driver-assist tech as AEB (which works at speeds more than 10km/h), electronic lane departure prevention, traffic sign recognition, and a reversing camera.

This variant also has eight airbags, blind spot monitoring, rear cross traffic alert, front turn assist, driver attention assist, hill descent control and more.

Isuzu improved its ownership program last year, and now has an impressive six years of warranty coverage, unfortunately limited to just 150,000km – which commercial buyers might find easy to exceed.

It also includes six years of roadside assist with unlimited kilometre coverage, and a seven-year capped-price service schedule (which has a 105,000km, whichever-occurs-first, limit hidden in the fine-print).

Prices for each service vary from $369 in the first year to a painful $1179 at the six-year mark. They average out to $549 per year for the life of the program.

That’s a bit more expensive than a HiLux, although the D-Max requires servicing less frequently, once a year or 15,000km, compared to the Toyota's six-month/10,000km intervals.

A six-year/150,000km warranty applies to this D-Max. Servicing intervals are set at 15,000km/12 month intervals. Capped priced servicing costs are $389, $409, $609, $509, $299, $749 and $409, costing a total of $3373 over the period.

A new D-Max owner also gets no-cost, seven-year roadside-assistance cover.