Living up to its Legend tag
TOYOTA’S HILUX 2.8 GD6 4X4: FULL OF SURPRISES
A vehicle which is supremely confident offroad and can take a punch.
Ihave never been a huge fan of double cab bakkies – but they are an institution and if you want to experience real life on the southern tip of Africa, you needed to be locked up in an institution … at least every once in a while.
Unless you’re a farmer, game ranger or construction engineer – all the manliest of jobs, it must be said – or you have hordes of relatives whose furniture needs moving on a regular basis when they get evicted from their rental accommodation then, frankly, what is the point?
They’re enormous (at least by SA standards; in America, they’d be regarded as slightly under-nourished), they sit high off the road (which many see and an advantage, but which is actually a dangerous characteristic) and they generally guzzle more fuel than their sedan and hatchback counterparts. They do have four doors and four or five seats. But, being built on the platform of a utility vehicle, the back passenger floor is high and flat, which makes long journeys for adults in the back tiring and painful.
They do have a considerable load bed – but in our crime-ridden homeland, that make you worry a bit when you pull up to the robots and all you have is a vinyl tonneau cover stretched over the back.
Even with the top-of-the-range electronic aids, like cameras and parking radar, the double cab is still a mission to park in an urban environment – although its ground clearance and tough nature mean it cares little for sidewalks and can appropriate them as a temporary stopping place.
Yet, double cabs are selling like hot cakes. Why? Well, because even though they’re pricey in top 4x4 spec, they’re still a lot cheaper than a fullon SUV. So if you have a family and want to travel to out of the way places capably and comfortably, then a double cab is a good option.
Undoubtedly, there is the appeal of ruggedness – these bakkies are, as Toyota correctly put it in a TV ad not so long ago, “tougherer” than mere mortal vehicles. That may be true – especially in the case of Toyota – but tough can quickly degenerate into arrogance and a bullying attitude once Mr Little Man Pretending To Be Macho gets behind the wheel.
These days, in the festive season lemming run to the coast, Road Hoggus Africanus is generally to be found in a double cab – tailgating or overtaking in the wrong places.
This is all by way of saying I was surprised – no, make that gobsmacked – about how good a top double cab, like Toyota’s Hilux 2.8 GD6 4X4 Legend RS AT (to give it its mouthful of a name) can be.
On a 3 000km-plus trip to Knysna and back, it proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it is as capable an open road cruiser as any big exec sedan.
The cabin, with more than a hint of the design of a Lexus (Toyota’s luxury brand) was quiet comfortable and enabled a 13 hour-plus trip to be undertaken while allowing driver and passenger to be fresh at the end.
I’ve done the trip to Knysna from Joburg (or the reverse) in a single day on about 15 occasions over the past 16 years and this was one of the best journeys, from a tiredness point of view. Not only that but the big bakkie surprised with frugal consumption of just under 8.5 litres per 100km there and back and running around in Knysna. Way back in the early 2000s, my petrol-engined Jetta averaged 8.3l/100km on family holiday trips.
On the road, the Hilux felt carlike, being quite agile for its size and possessing steering feedback you wouldn’t expect in the class. Because of the big tyres and soft suspension, the ride was one of the best I have experienced on the coastal haul … and that includes a top range Audi A8 executive saloon some years back.
All of this comes with the knowledge that, with the 4x4 version, you have a vehicle which is supremely confident offroad and can take a punch, as the okes say. As I write this, Toyota’s heavily modified team of Hilux racers is tackling the punishing Dakar Rally.
But, still, I wonder. What about around town? The answer to that I see every day – in the women driving the family Hilux to the shops or dropping kids at school. You quickly grow accustomed to the vehicle and piloting it becomes second nature.
It’s no surprise, then, that the Hilux is the best-selling bakkie in the country. It’s a Toyota after all and they don’t call the top versions of it Legend for nothing. After the atomic apocalypse – if it ever comes – we know that cockroaches will probably the only living things which survive. Don’t be surprised if they drive Hiluxes…
Ride was one of best I have experienced on coastal haul
8.5l
Consumption per 100km on round trip to Knysna