Why I choose to drive a Toyota?
written by Jeremy Clarkson in Jan 2004 Top Gear mag:
"It’s been drowned, it’s been torched, it’s been dropped from the air, and yet
it’s still running. Turn the key, the engine fires up, and it goes. We tried to
finish this car, but it finished us. And that’s why we present it to you here,
photographed with all the sense of occasion we’d afford an Aston Martin.
It’s the Toyota Hilux pickup, and it is, without doubt, the most indestructible
car in the world. In truth TG has always been a fan of this particular Toyota
and I’ve loved them ever since I popped my pickup cherry eight years ago when
making the TV series Motorworld.
The location was Dubai, and I’d hired one in advance as our filming vehicle. At
the airport, the car-hire firm gave me the keys to what the brochure promised
would be a shiny new Toyota pick up but, as I found outside, was actually a skip
with a badge – rusty patches, dented panels, broken flatbed planks, knackered
tyres, shiny steering wheel, torn seats, wobbly gearstick…the list went on. I
remonstrated for a while, then drove off fuming.
But a fortnight later, back at the airport, and I was saying a sad farewell to a
real friend. Beneath the tramp-like body was hidden a cracking engine and
unburstable mechanicals, so the pickup quickly got nicknamed the ‘Millennium
Falcon’. At one point we filmed a 4x4 desert rally and that day the Falcon
pulled every brand of heavy duty 4x4 – Range Rover, Patrol, Shogun – free from
the dunes when they got stuck. It was humble, but unstoppable, and I’ll never
forget it.
Since then it never surprises me to see pictures on the telly of a war going off
somewhere and every one’s running around in shagged Toyota pickups decked out as
troop carriers or missile launchers. Do you know the Toyota pickup is the most
stollen vehicle in Africa?
It was kind of inevitable then that one day Top Gear would get round to
conducting its own roughness tests. We picked at random from the Hilux gene
pool, and bought one out of the classifieds for a grand. It was 15 or so years
old, a diesel, with 190k tough farm miles on the clock. We began its torture
trials in Bristol because, as Clarkson reasoned, the city so closely connected
with Brunel has always appreciated things made of girders.
Test number one involved that film car-chase chestnut-driving down some steps.
Normally this involves stuntmen and special cars, but the pickup was afforded no
such nannying. Straight in and straight down 50-odd unyielding stone steps.
Everything clattered and clanked, but it was a mere amuse bouche for the Hilux.
In fact, the steps came off worse.
Next we crashed it head on into a tree. Surely this would damage its beating
heart. But no; the rollbar sighed, the front wing buckled, and the gubbins under
the bonnet carried on undisturbed.
Time to really up the ante: drowning. The plan was simple, take the Toyota to
the beach, park it on slipway, let the tide cover it, and then drive it off once
the water had subsided…Even if our simple plan had gone ahead, it would have
been an extreme test for the car, but the local RNLI warned us that the tides
sweeping up the Bristol channel were the second most powerful in the world, and
that it would be a good idea to lash the car down.
You could see their point, because when the water did come, it was as if God
himself had taken up the challenge. The tides engulfed the car, smashing out the
windscreen, snapping the mooring ropes like cotton, and then tossing the pickup
into the air before dragging it beneath the waves. When we finally found it,
there was no hope. It had been in sea water for four hours, and lay on its side,
smashed and windowless, with sand covering ever component. Our mechanic shook
his head. By our strict rules he would work on the car, but not replace
anything, and his tools were basic-spanners, etc. But he cranked the engine
manually, flushed the wat3er out, did this and that, and 45 minutes later, the
bloody thing fired up and drove off the beach. So, down it went to our test
track for some more …….
We drover it through our production office, hut, then we dropped it from a
crane, and that buckled the suspension a bit, but otherwise it couldn’t care
less. We dropped a caravan on its head, then smashed it with a wrecking ball,
but again it brushed off our efforts with disdain. Finally we set fire to it,
but when the fire was out, the Hilux started up again, as if to say ‘what’s
next?
At that point we thought it might get annoyed and start hitting us, to we threw
in the towel, and now this bashed Toyota |Hilux, an icon of toughness, has taken
its place in the pantheon of Top Gear greats.
I’ve no doubt that the Millennium Falcon is still out there somewhere in Dubai,
running around, head-butting deserts. And in the future when – Arnie keeps
warning us – the machines eventually do rise up. You know whet they’ll be
driving."
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