all help make any situation survivable. Inside it’s rather better than survivable. The fine leather Recaro seats will help you stay alert over a long day behind the wheel and, anyway, it’s a Land Cruiser cabin, it’s a fine place to be. Behind the front seats though, it’s a different story. There was a racking system and also a slide-out frame for a fridge amid some not very pretty but very effective modifications. When we saw it, the rear looked like it had been modified to carry wolves and, frankly, the wolves had won. The thick metal mesh barrier behind the driver and front passenger looked like it had done its job, but the rear was completely stripped out and looked it had been seriously used, mostly by things with claws. Of course, this is simply the rig doing its job. It wasn’t there to look good, it was there to carry spare transmissions and wheels and so on for the main rally vehicle, plus it had to carry spares and equipment for itself and for the hot squishy things that sat in it. By 2019, the Land Cruiser was ready to back up its looks. It was entered as one of the support vehicles in the 2019 Morocco Desert Challenge. Very creditably, James Ford and his team came ninth, in a Bowler, and it was supported all the
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way by the Land Cruiser. It did its job, supported, survived and got back to the UK. After that it had a much easier life, towing rally cars and generally not being worked too hard. But, really, this is such a monumentally capable off-roader, it would take something really rather extreme to make it even break into a sweat. It certainly looks the part and would have looked fairly epic in the local Sainsbury’s car park, but this is a vehicle for exploring the world, not the M25. When it came up for auction it had less than 50,000 miles on it, although it was obvious that some of those thousands had been at a pretty extreme level. Given all that, would you buy it? And what would you do with it? It had an estimate of £20,000-£25,000, which sounds to us like a great deal of car for your money, though it actually went for somewhere in the middle of that. It was offered as perhaps the ‘ultimate private estate runabout’ but fortunately that didn’t happen. Instead, and happily, the Toyota went to a couple who we know are going to use it and will cherish it. How do we know that ? Because they already own four Toyota Land Cruisers, that’s how. Not only that but they also have a solid history of heading off for overland expeditions. So this rig
almost certainly isn’t going to get put out to grass, it’s going to be heading off for new horizons and new adventures. After all, that’s what it was designed, built and then modified to do. At 50,000 miles, it has some time before it gets to 500,000 but don’t bet against a Toyota Land Cruiser.
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