So, which is the best looking?

Like most bust-ups, this one started in the parking lot, observed by the assembled army of journalists and testers tasked with evaluating these 10. Our venue was Klipbokkop Mountain Reserve outside of Worcester, arguably the most exhaustive 4x4 testing facility in the Western Cape, and a venue that’s seen many a pre-production 4x4 tested to the edge of destruction by Gerhard and his team before going on sale. Trust us, out here, there’s nowhere to hide.

Joining the CAR team was offroad guru Gerhard Groenewald; Mark Samuel, editor of Popular Mechanics; and Carri-anne Jane, the motoring editor for Woman and Home. So, we had a well-rounded, unbiased point of view on the double cabs ... and the arguments had started before we’d left the parking lot.

Styling wasn’t an aspect of bakkie ownership that would’ve ranked highly years back but nowadays, most top-of-the-range leisure lifestylers come dressed to the nines in exterior addenda and attention-grabbing alloy wheels. Resident photographic expert, Peet Mocke – who spends hours each day with his lens trained on cars – picked the Pro-4x adorned Nissan Navara straight away as the easiest on the eye with its Warrior Grey paint, blacked-out grille and alloy wheels with red ashes.

It’s no easy task injecting stylistic distinction into the prescribed double-cab form. Yet, Ford’s FX4 package does so for the Ranger XLT, a bakkie that’s matured well over its lifecycle.

With a sleek, car-like silhouette and single-frame grille that blends stylishly into its headlamps, the new Mazda BT-50 looks like one of the most expensive bakkies here – which it most certainly is – and it sports attractive 18-inch rims with relatively low-pro le rubber for good on-road stance. But more about the pros and cons of slender sidewalls later …

The slightly older Mitsubishi Triton, meanwhile, still comes across as an attractive bakkie, as does the Volkswagen Amarok, even if the Highline in restrained white looks at odds with the volcanic performance of the V6 TDI.

This is all highly subjective, of course; you might rank them completely differently.