Tail firmly between legs – The new Landcruiser

Post the disastrous result of our wonderful 40 series LandCruiser having a gearbox failure and the discovery that country mechanics have little interest in helping those with older vehicles we came to the conclusion that we should probably look for a replacement vehicle. While this might not be a permanent choice i.e. after the return from the trip we sell the car and carry on with the old toy, it could be…

We’ve long worked on the 37 year old 40 series LandCruiser repairing/ preparing the vehicle for trips and we’ve learned to accept its oddities. We’ve also not even driven what you might call a ‘modern’ car, the MX-5 while being legendary, is still a 2006 car with a CD player and electric windows as features. Thus the talk these days about lane change control, assisted highway braking sounds fantastic but … what are they.

So to begin our adventure we had a few suggestions from the family who largely, it would seem, just buy Pajeros. This was, the Toyota Fortuner, Pajero Sport and the Isuzu MUX. To be honest, we wanted to replace the Land Cruiser, with, well, a Land Cruiser. But, technology moves on so, worth a look?

All three of these cars were far more advanced than anything we had driven, and all were capable 4WD replacement vehicles which also had the lovely benefit of being very good cars around the city.

• Toyota Fortuner GXL ~$54/55k depending on how much rubbish we added (bull bar etc), ~60k for the crusade
  • The first car we drove
  • Looked the best out of the three
  • In the brief drive, it drove well
  • The crusade was lovely inside, maybe the GX/ GXL aren’t as nice?

• Isuzu MU-X LS-T ~$57k for heaps of plastic
  • Looks great on the outside
  • Everyone says they tow great, we have no idea
  • Apparently the running gear is out of something good, according to the internet
  • Made us nervous to drive as it seems to wobble around
  • Stepping out of the luxurious Fortuner crusade and into the rather horrible plasticky interior of the MUX was a shock. I’m sure it’s practical and easy to clean but I’d feel ripped off if I spent 60k on it
  • 3.0 Turbo Diesel was lovely, and yes as the dealer told us rev’d very low at highway speeds.

• Pajero Sport Exceed – $54k
  • Makes the other cars seem like they only have electric windows. The sales guy took about 30 minutes to explain all the things that were in the car. I’m sure they were great, but I was excited when he said it had electric windows, the rest just seemed like a whole lot of stuff which I didn’t seem to need before, but now we did?
  • Drove nicely, but not as nice as the Fortuner, but that might’ve been because the Fortuner was first
  • Looks nice at the front, not fans the rear

We did not make up the captions, they are literally from their websites, amazingly enough they must all know about each other?

Given we all lost more that that on the stock market this week I figure that the prices hardly matter….

Anyway, after a lot of thought on the subject the question really boiled down too; Do you need one car for everything, or is two ok and both can be good at their own things? If you need a car which is fit for all uses then the cars above would be perfect. Which ones better, in my nonsense opinion, basically I’m sure they’re all plenty capable of doing weekend 4WDing more capably than any sensible person would require. Thus, if you like gadgets then get the Pajero Sport, it might also be the most capable of going over wild stuff because of the full time 4WD. Get the Isuzu MU-X if you want something reliable (and probably the best at pulling things) and spill stuff in the cabin often. Get the Fortuner if you like a car that looks nice, has almost as many gadgets as the Pajero Sport, plenty comfortable inside. The only issue with the Fortuner is that it is related to the Hilux which is a 100% bogan (cool?) car and Lena is not a Hilux fan.

If it were us, we’d buy the Fortuner, it was the nicest and the best looking.

So on that note and after the research, we bought a Land Cruiser 70 series GXL Wagon. What? Well, first, we are doing a trip around Australia and I’m sure all the other contenders are great, but we didn’t feel like driving off into a place where there is no internet, which we would need to work out how to get the car into 4WD. It’s made for The Australian outback, given we’re going into The Australian Outback, seems like a reasonable choice. It is by far the best looking car in the 4WD landscape, even with its stupid rear track being 95mm narrower than the front. It also looks and sounds awesome… I mean, really do you require any more justification?

Last point, don’t trust delivery times when the corona virus is on a rampage, you just might not get what you want…

Hello new LandCruiser.