7 minute read
Alan Kidd Are proper off-road vehicles about to come back into fashion?
Alan Kidd Editor
Car manufacturers are forever trying to predict the future. It takes something like half a decade to develop a new model from scratch, so they need to know that what they’re working on now will be the right thing for their customers in fi ve years’ time. There’s a whole industry dedicated to delivering ‘market intelligence’ to help them do this, and entire departments whose sole job is to predict things like what paint colours will be in fashion when the next generation of vehicles comes out.
It’s a long way from a bloke picking up a stick and drawing the outline of a rudimentary 4x4 in the sand on a beach in Anglesey, then the fi nished vehicle being launched to the world the following year. But we all know how that ended up.
Anyway, some time in the late 1980s or very early 1990s, when everyone was turning its back on GTis and falling over themselves to buy an off-roader instead, someone came up with a bit of business intelligence that helped shape the future of the car market in a way they can’t possibly have imagined. They looked at all these Suzuki Samurais, Land Rover Discoverys, Mitsubishi Shoguns, Isuzu Troopers, Jeep Cherokees and so on that were sweeping the world, and they noticed something: almost nobody was taking them off-road.
And so, quite rightly, they fi gured that if car manufacturers were to make vehicles that looked like these off-roaders but weren’t, people would buy them anyway. If vehicles with low-range transfer cases, beam axles and ladder chassis were being driven by people to whom all these things were actually irrelevant, you could take them away and they wouldn’t stop.
It stands to reason. As I write this, I’m eating a takeaway pizza from a cardboard box. If the cardboard box had teak inserts to make it stronger and a brass lock for security, it would make no difference to my dinner – but it would make life harder and more expensive for the company that makes the pizza.
Someone who used to put pizzas in boxes designed around the same principle as the antique campaign chest in my mum’s living room would, at some stage,
Is the proper off-road market about to come back into fashsion again? have realised that cardboard would work just as well and nobody would mind. If that someone worked in the market intelligence sector, every pizza maker would jumped on the cardboard bandwagon overnight. And so it was with 4x4s. The fi rst soft-roader on the market was the Toyota RAV4 (I’m not counting the Matra Rancho, though it certainly has a claim), but it was followed by an absolute torrent of new-style motors with monocoque construction, allindependent suspension and no low range. It’s not because Toyota had the idea and everyone copied them. It’s because everyone was working on the same idea and Toyota was fi rst on the market with it. Pretty soon, the world was awash with softroaders, and it has been ever since. But has there been some other sort of market intelligence that fl ies in the face of all this? I ask because while soft-roaders do continue to Rule OK, I’m seeing a few signs here and there that car makers are starting to pay attention to the proper off-road market again too. There will be no wholesale return to the days when everything had low box, clearly. But consider the INEOS Grenadier. The guy behind it didn’t become Britain’s richest man by chucking billions at vanity projects. The company did all its proper due diligence on the business case for creating a brand new hardcore off-roader and concluded that yes, a market did exist. Then there’s SsangYong. Its latest design sketch for a forthcoming new model shows a vehicle looking like a cross between a Toyota FJ Cruiser and the Jeep Hurricane. The Rexton and Korando are both way too new to be ready for replacement, so this is either the next-gen Tivoli (in which case the design is incredibly misleading at best) or a whole new model. SsangYong calls itself the Korean Land Rover. Is it about to hit us with a Korean Defender? Now, that really would be a case, and a heroically bold one, of a car maker trying to predict the future. Tel: 01283 553243 Email: enquiries@assignment-media.co.uk Web: www.totaloffroad.co.uk www.4x4i.com Online Shop: www.toronline.co.uk Facebook: www.facebook.com/totaloffroad www.facebook.com/4x4Mag
Editor
Alan Kidd
Art Editor
Samantha D’Souza
Contributors
Dan Fenn, Paul Looe, Gary Noskill, Olly Sack, Tom Alderney, Gary Simpson, Mike Trott, Raymond and Nereide Greaves
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Rear kit pair Rear kit pair
