Size Doesn’t Actually Matter Anymore, Even for Off-Road Vehicles
The Drive ·
The era of the small, nimble off-roader is behind us. I'm not sure how to feel about that. The post Size Doesn’t Actually Matter Anymore, Even for Off-Road Vehicles appeared first on The Drive .
A few years back at Easter Jeep Safari, then-Jeep-executives Mark Allen and Jim Morrison subtly warned the assembled media that the off-road scene had hit a point of no return. The future of off-road performance, they told us, is all about building machines that can simply brute-force their way over obstacles rather than trying to maneuver around them. In other words, the era of the nimble, short-wheelbase 4×4 is effectively over—only nobody has really bothered to say as much out loud.
You’ve probably noticed this trend even if off-roading isn’t your scene. Ram’s Power Wagon is colloquially referred to as the truck that can go anywhere—even though it could find itself stranded by the narrow dimensions of some older drive-through lanes. All three of the domestic builders offer a heavy-duty pickup in some sort of off-road trim. We already mentioned Ram’s, and GM has both the Colorado HD ZR2 and the Sierra HD AT4X.
It was behind the wheel of the redesigned Chevy that I was reminded of the current state of things. As we approached an obstacle, our guide discussed a few possible lines we might take to traverse it without introducing the ZR2’s skid plates to the scenery. But then, after a brief pause, he followed up by telling us we could just as readily throw his advice out the window and simply wing it. And that’s just what we did, to no ill effect.
That was par for the course on the day. The truck’s biggest weakness by far was its massive footprint. If you’re in a financial position to treat your side mirrors as wear items and simply accept that the truck is going to end up pinstriped to all hell, there’s very little out there that will give you real trouble short of a properly technical trail.
How did we get here exactly? In a word: Marketing. Ruggedness is all the rage, especially with millennials, who represent America’s up-and-coming moneyed generation. Everything needs an off-road trim now . It’s no surprise that pickups were among the first to push their 4×4 chops; most of them already had off-road packages that have since been either re-branded or simply expanded upon (See: Ford’s FX4, GM’s Z71).
But that explains why the industry wants all these off-road trucks; it doesn’t explain what made them technically possible. That really boils down to two things: 1) Improvements in tire manufacturing, and 2) the evolution of electronic safety systems. The former has given us factory tire diameters as large as 37 inches, and the latter helped us fit them to increasingly taller and heavier trucks without littering the side of the road with 4×4 carcasses.
Even Jeep is signalling that its future lies in larger SUVs and pickup trucks . If so, that could lend credibility to increasingly frequent rumors that the two-door Wrangler won’t survive to see another generation. As the owner of a short-wheelbase JK, I hope it’s not true, but as somebody who spends more time than he’d like wheeling in big-ass trucks, I can see the writing on the wall.
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