Off the tarmac, away from the dealership. Adventure, builds and life beyond the road.
Volkswagen Golf Country: the lifted Golf Europe laughed at, built where they make the G-Wagen Every Volkswagen showroom in America is now full of tall hatchbacks with plastic fender trim and all-wheel drive badges, and nobody thinks twice about it. In 1990, Volkswagen tried selling exactly that idea in Europe, and Europe laughed it out … Read more
Alfa Romeo Matta: Alfa studied a Land Rover, gave it a dry sump, won its class at the 1952 Mille Miglia, lost the Army deal, and sold for $67,100 in 2017.
Fiat Campagnola: The Italian Jeep That Beat Alfa Romeo and Carried a Pope Classic & Sports Car counts 359,489 Willys MBs built between 1941 and 1945. Fiat built roughly 40,000 Campagnolas between 1951 and 1973. Same job description, about a ninth of the volume, and it still beat a more advanced Alfa Romeo in a … Read more
Oshkosh JLTV: The Vehicle That Buried the Humvee — Then Got Buried Beside It When Oshkosh won the largest light tactical vehicle contract in history, one of its executives made a claim that sounds like ad copy but turned out to be roughly true. He said the vehicle delivered the ballistic protection of a light … Read more
Humvee: The World-Beater Born From a Lamborghini That Almost Died Here is a fact the U.S. Army would rather you forgot. The most recognisable military vehicle on Earth — the one that rolled across Iraqi sand live on CNN, the one Schwarzenegger turned into a driveway trophy — owes its existence to a borrowed blueprint, … Read more
The Spanish 4×4 That Beat the Defender, Then Bankrupted Its Own Factory Top Gear built an entire personality around the idea that the Defender was unbeatable — slow, agricultural, and somehow untouchable, the automotive equivalent of a national monument nobody was allowed to criticise. In July 2005, a British magazine tested that assumption properly. “4×4 … Read more
The Spanish Factory That Started Fixing Solihull’s Homework Chris Harris once said the joy of an old Land Rover is that it forgives you for everything except neglect. Fair enough. But nobody in Britain ever built the version that admits the factory itself needed forgiving too. That version was built in Spain, by a company … Read more
Aixam Mega Track: the off-road supercar that arrived 25 years early The best-selling Lamborghini in history isn’t a Countach or a Miura. It’s the Urus, an SUV. The Porsche the internet lost its mind over a couple of years ago was the 911 Dakar, a jacked-up, all-wheel-drive 911 built to leave the pavement. The whole … Read more
Toyota FJ40: the truck that won by never breaking down Here’s a fact that should sting a little if you grew up on American iron. The vehicle that first put Toyota on the map in the United States wasn’t the Corolla, or the Corona, or the Celica. It was a boxy Japanese 4×4 that looked … Read more
The Pinzgauer Is the Best Camper Base on Earth (and the One You Shouldn’t Buy) Top Gear once parked a Pinzgauer next to a Land Rover and the joke wrote itself: one of them looked like it had wandered off a NATO base, the other looked like it wanted to go to Waitrose. Twenty years … Read more
The Unimog Was Built to Straddle Two Rows of Potatoes (and Ended Up Crossing Deserts) Jeremy Clarkson once drove a Unimog through a brick wall on Top Gear and seemed genuinely surprised when the wall lost. That’s the Unimog in one image: a vehicle so absurdly overbuilt that demolishing a house feels like a Tuesday. … Read more
The Ugly 75-Horsepower Box That Gave Birth to Quattro Picture the scene. Frozen Scandinavia, somewhere in the winter of 1976. A team of Audi engineers is out testing prototypes on sheets of ice, and trailing behind them as a support vehicle is a squat, canvas-topped military runabout with all the visual charm of a filing … Read more
