Archived Comparison
From the July 1997 Issue of Car and Driver
TESTED
For nearly as long as Ali has been rassling opponents, C/D has been rassling with off-road vehicles. It's been a confusing struggle. Were sports-car guys to affect passion for lightly madeover trucks? Were we to embrace vehicles whose on-pavement behavior was slightly more compromised than Chuck Keating's 401K?
Well, maybe. In fact, our opinions began to rotate the moment various editors sport-uted themselves into the heart of Borneo, over the Himalayas, and most recently, directly atop a wrecked Subaru in Town & Country's junkyard. In their own way, those off-road excursions in Rovers, Jeeps, and Cruisers have been as entertaining as hot laps in NSXs at Sebring, though somewhat dustier.
It's more than a trend. We recently noticed that five of the 10 vehicles in our own long-term fleet were equipped with four-wheel drive. Last year, Ford alone managed to park 402,663 Explorers in private garages that, in large measure, formerly housed automobiles. Fewer persons contracted swine flu, and that was labeled an epidemic.
Our complaints about off-road machines—wallowy handling, numb steering, primitive engineering, shameful fuel mileage—tended to become less shrill if those same vehicles could prove they were dual-purpose rides. Around the office, the critical query became: "How far, exactly, can these four-wheelers venture off the pavement?" The correct answer was, "So far that Michael Ovitz's cell phone won't work."
We were serious this time. Forget about logging roads and ski trips to Aspen. We wanted to know how large a granite boulder had to be to thwart an off-roader. How deep a trout stream would drown the thing? How steep an exfoliating outcrop could each climb if its wheels were contending with 18 inches of sand the consistency of cocaine?
This was not to be a traditional comparison test, nor in one story could we evaluate every four-wheel-drive machine with off-road pretensions. (There are about 50 of them on the market.) Instead, the idea was to flog one representative from each of eight four-wheel-drive classes, coaxing it off-road until it got stuck, fragged itself into scrap, or frightened its driver into therapy with Joe Bob Briggs. If you are considering an off-road machine, it will be represented by one of these eight classes.
From each vehicle's performance we hoped to intuit credible generalizations about the class. For example, would the wide track, long wheelbase, and immense weight of the Ford Expedition—and by inference its colleagues such as the GMC/Chevy Suburban—hobble it while driving off-road? Could a vehicle without a low-range transfer case—the Toyota RAV4, for instance—really pull Uncle Seth's ATV out of the sippy hole? Could a converted car, such as the Subaru Legacy Outback, lay claim to any off-road bona fides?
It was our task to find out or to become clay-encrusted in the attempt. Each vehicle would be subjected to identical off-road traumas, on the same day, until the impediment stymied forward motion. Because we expected to place these vehicles in harm's way, we carried with us chains and Hi-Lifts and snatch straps and Little Debbie Snack Cakes and Lea Magee. Magee is a Camel Trophy instructor, the man you'd see in the Camel ads if the Camel man drank only Earl Grey. We also enlisted the dirt-donking brain power of Four Wheeler magazine's John Stewart (editorial director), Mark Williams (road-test editor), and Ben Stewart (features editor). Those three promised to lay out a kind of three-day four-wheel-drive Olympics, in which any individual event involving music would be instantly canceled. They also promised to lend pro driving tips when the impediments grew larger than Pierre Salinger's eyebrows or the Subaru floated downstream. (It did not, but they muttered dire stuff like that often.)
Assembling first at Four Wheeler's offices in Santa Monica, we measured each vehicle's suspension flexibility (see the ramp-travel index), and its approach and departure angles. For the latter, we used a highly scientific chunk of plywood, in case the real off-road course later turned out to be plywood, too. Then it was off to Death Valley, past the Spearmint Rhino Adult Cabaret, past the world's tallest thermometer, even past the Opah Ditch. We were on our way to hurl $237,328 worth of wheels at the Dumont Dunes, at Soggy Dry Lake, at the Fry Mountains, at the Crab Flats Trail, and at a yellow Dumpster that one of our pro drivers unwittingly attempted to push into the no-smoking section of the Furnace Creek Inn.
