Jeep Compass Trailhawk Hardcore version of mid-size family SUV

Back on the fl at, meanwhile, you need to disengage it again if you want to have any chance at all of making smooth progress. Try to drive normally with it still primed and it will bang in savagely every time you try to ease your foot off the gas. What this means is that on undulating terrain, you’re forever going on and off the HDC button – and all the while yearning for effective low box.

Bizarrely, you need HDC on the way up hills, too. This is because, should you fail one, the vehicle will run away backwards even if it’s still in drive (or fi rst, or second, more of which in a moment). This won’t happen so long as the magic button is down, which you could argue makes for a safer and easier failed hillclimb technique than the one you learned back in the day aboard your mate’s toxic old Vitara, but for it to be able to do so at all is alarming to say the least.

Something else we didn’t like one bit was that the gearbox would refuse to take second gear until we were doing about 15mph. Yes, in low range. When you’re at the bottom of a long, steep hill and you want your vehicle to be correctly set up for it from the word go, that’s not good. Yes, the technology is there and it wants to do everything for you, and with what we’ve already said about low range it stands to reason that you might need to stay in fi rst to scale a hill, but we like auto boxes that listen to what they’re told when we’re using them off-road.

Those are the grumbles, and they sound worse than they really are. Overall, while it did frustrate us in these ways, the Trailhawk impresses as an agile, sure-footed off-roader whose ability to negotiate extreme terrain is well beyond what most family SUVs could ever hope to do. Its steering is nice and light and it’s very manoeuvrable, allowing you to pick a line with great accuracy – something that’s aided by good all-round visibility and a suite of cameras displaying various angles on what’s in front of and behind you. These come up on a large infotainment screen that’s the dominant element of an attractive looking dash layout. It looks technical rather than premium, but the use of materials is generally good; there’s leather, or something that looks and feels similar to it, on the upper surfaces, with contrasting red stitching and a horizontal styling element that may be plastic but looks enough like brushed alloy to get the job done. Lower surfaces are hard plastic, but it feels dense and robust – there are a few creaks from elsewhere in the facia, and the fl oor console isn’t the most solid thing we’ve ever touched, but the structure it’s all pinned to has plenty of heft.

There’s plenty of space, too, in both rows of seats, for four tall adults to travel together without any fi ghts breaking out. Those in the rear might just fi nd their knees touching the seat-backs ahead of them, but even then only if someone up front is either abnormally tall or downright greedy. Headroom is very decent all-round, too, and when the seats go down they leave a usably long cargo area whose fl oor, though there’s a biggish step down in it, is pretty fl at overall.

On the road, the Compass is as brisk as you could ask for and pulls well on the way up steep hills. It’s not scintillatingly fast, nor is it rapier sharp to steer, but it’s positive and precise – though we found that unless the active lane keeping function was switched off, what feel there is in the wheel was completely overwhelmed. Having fi gured out what was going on here and dug around in the infotainment menus to cancel it off, we found that the vehicle was transformed in its B-road handling.

It’s easy to tool around in town, where the suspension deals very competently with the sort of road surfaces we have to endure here as a matter of course. And it cruises very quietly on the motorway, while sitting in its lane with excellent stability.

This is general Compass stuff we’re talking about now, rather than Trailhawk-specifi c, but it’s as relevant as ever in these pages because for more or less anyone who reads 4x4, if you’re in the market for one of these vehicles this is the only one you’ll want. And so you should, because despite our reservations about its performance in low box, this is still next-level stuff by family SUV standards.

When you drive an SUV that looks like the Compass, you soon get used to hilarious comments from an endless stream of people who all think they must be the fi rst one ever to have thought up this or that joke about spray-on mud. There’s a set of stickers on the bonnet to wind them up even more, too. But the fact is, that mud can be very real. The Compass Trailhawk is an excellent all-round family SUV, a green champion – and an off-road machine with the ability to take on the sort of terrain that will leave almost any of its rivals clutching at straws.

D-MAX TO DE MAX

Newly reintroduced to the Isuzu D-Max range, the AT35 blends high-end luxuries with a mini-monster image courtesy of Arctic Trucks. It’s not made for British lanes – but it’s perfect for Salisbury Plain

IT’S KIND OF HARD TO BELIEVE

that the original Isuzu D-Max AT35 went on sale six years ago. It’s been part of the range ever since, on and off, with breaks when the old model was facelifted and then when the current one replaced it.

That second hiatus is now over, however, and the AT35 is back. Back, and back on top of the D-Max range. It’s based on the erstwhile top-speccer, the V-Cross, and costs from £47,999 plus VAT on the road. Make that £49,499 in automatic form, which is what we’ve got here.

We’ve got it, and what are we going to do with it? A traditional road test would be a bit redundant – we’ve been through the story of the new D-Max, and the V-Cross. itself, in great detail, and we ran a fi rstdrive story on the AT35 two or three issues ago. So instead, let’s do what we’re always saying we don’t think it’s all that good at: let’s go laning.

The phrase ‘let’s go laning’ ranks among our favourites. So this will be no chore. Still, we know from experience that the older versions of the AT35 can be less of a weapon than you’d think. The lack of a locking rear diff was a big part of this on the old model, albeit only in very specifi c situations which, British rights of way ‘management’ being what it is, don’t crop up very often, but Isuzu

put that right with the new one so we’re expecting it to be surer-footed on the most uneven ground.

The ground in question is on Salisbury Plain, where we used the D-Max to lay out a roadbook which will appear in a future issue. Being the middle of summer, the troops were scarce and the red fl ags were down, so we used a variety of tracks in the impact area that aren’t open much of the time – which was fun, though as normal on the Plain it was mainly faster, looser going rather than tight, technical stuff.

We chose this for one over-riding reason, which is that the trails here are expansively wide open. The