Essential Ingredients

Our little experiment in trail-bombing a first-gen Toyota Rav4 has been an exercise in simplicity. Old Man Emu springs & shocks from Rocky Road outfitters (rocky-road.com) serves as the core, adding necessary inches to underbody draft for this all-wheel drive trucklet. More clearance was essential for off-road use, and a pleasant side effect of the Old Man Emu kit was the increase in lateral stability over factory springs, plus a reduction of the mushiness inherent to the factory shocks. The additional inch and a half height in back, with slightly less in front, quickly introduced to us that skid plates would be necessary under the oil pan.

No improvements are better than free improvements. Yanking the extruded aluminum rocker covers from below the doorline reduced the width of our Rav-4-Crawling at the essential knee-high rock-detecting skirt-line, and it cost us nothing but time. Visit the story from last month and you’ll see – free can actually be worth it. The trucklet looks a little skinny nowadays, but that’s a good thing. While underneath our experiment in el cheapo trail play, the absence of skid plates for the fuel tank and center & rear diffs was obvious.

We’ve anchored the roots of the Rav-4-Crawling experience with an atypical trail tire, the Dunlop Rover RVXT. They’re not as aggressive as the Goodyear Wrangler MT/Rs we plan to try in fit in the future, but there’s enough of a lug for excellent sand and dirt grip, generous siping, bead retention and sidewall tolerance at pressures as low as 18psi (so far), and fair to middlin’ mud capabilities – as long as they’re spinning, you probably won’t need the jerk-strap. Snow traction has been reassuring on snowboarding runs betwixt desert weekends, and on-road, the RVXT is quiet and predictable.

Give the Dunlop RVXTs a look – lots of sipe, plenty of lug.

Finding the Limits of Function

So we bombed it. New Year’s holiday at Ocotillo Wells, we joined some Jeeper buddies for the big Rav4 Break-In or Break It celebration of evaluation. Wasting no time, we unloaded our firewood and whatnot into the center of the motorhome fortress and followed our man Rudy into a tight little canyon just south of camp. The trucklet had been in the sand and boinged around stock-suspended, but now we were getting a feel for the new suspension, and trying to keep up with a friend in a prepped Jeep.

Don’t fool yourself. The Rav4 is not a Jeep. That’s okay. With an improvement in clearance and proper tires, we were keeping pace. As the trail widened into more of a wash than a crevasse, Rudy poured it on. Small berms and movements in the flow channel that had been charming grew alarming. The trucklet grew more the projectile than vehicle as it was repeatedly put in the air – really – and we rocketed from lip to lip trying to find the limits of control. And you could control it. To our surprise (though the guys on the web would say they said so), the fully independent corners left us to attend to car control without fighting excessive body movement or the obnoxious bucking that can consume a Jeep in high-speed trail play.

In and out of the little washes and canyons, the Rav4 did not get stuck.

Some MPH helped stability. Keeping all four tires turning made targeting trail features with the Rav4 easier, all the while locked at the center with the OEM locker – this is a feature available on five-speed all-wheel drive Rav4s only. Attention to line and detail were more necessary at that increased speed, but it kept us close to the Jeep. Rudy did not escape.

Deep into the evening, the Jeeps pulled out to crawl a serious crack they’d hit earlier that day. Night crawling is just fine if you have the candlepower. We gave chase in the Rav4, living in second gear with an occasional pop in third when connecting washes opened up. Once we found their little chasm, though, it was painfully obvious the jerk-strap in the battle bag was a necessity. First gear was essential too. The canyon walls grew as we were led further in, and the pack of Jeeps disappeared ahead. Great.

New Year’s day, we paused under the 86 on our way to the Salton Sea.

Slow Is Not Stopped

As we recognized we hadn’t the power or suspension travel to keep up, it also became clear that a modded Rav4 was quite competent on this sort of trail, crawling as the Jeepers, just slower. Two more Jeeps passed us, but with some sensible tire placement (remember, we’re still without much undercarriage protection), stopping was uneccesary. As narrow as a Wrangler (narrower than the new JK), the Rav4 fit the path just fine as it pinched narrower, 20ft walls of dirt on each side, until the trail necked down to a slim spike fit only for a motorcycle. At this point we were trapped, unable to figure where the Jeepers had gone until spying a sandy 45-degree incline to the right. Nowhere left to roam, with about 90hp to our name, we gave the throttle a stomping and flat-footed it out with a running start. Momentarily startled by a bizarre crackling, whistling noise that came from the uphill end of the trucklet, we soon discovered it was about 20 screaming Jeepers who’d gathered to place bets on whether the Rav4 could make it out.

There are different sorts of crawling. We’re building the Rav4 for dirt and rock, stuff you’d find in most national parks and recreational areas. We’re aiming for a disposable toy you could get yourself lost with in an area like the Colorado backwoods, and still drive home. It certainly isn’t a crawler that could compete with the radical rigs you’d find at Moab, Big Bear or other rock-intensive playgrounds, but it isn’t supposed to be. So far, though, the way we have the Rav4 set up, we can go where 90% of the Jeepers at Ocotillo went, albeit a little slower. It will go there.

Improvement Introduces Necessity

There’s much yet to do to this little trucklet. To satisfy both personal observations and a number of suggestions from the web, skid plates are on the top of our list – ArmorCraft has offered to design and build them for the first-gen Rav4. We’re going to find a little more height for the front end, and hang a plate-steel bumper up there too (thin plate – it’s a small trucklet). Trail lights are pending for the front end too, which we’ll probably install twice – once in the factory bumper and once in the impending plate unit. We’ve secured factory Rav4 roof racks, and we’ll be building a tray, deflector and light bar for that. There’s a pile of OEM-style replacement necessities up and coming for this billion-mile Rav4 too, like the engine and trans mounts, a big fuel pump, home-fabbed intake and maybe a snorkel. We’ll even do useless electronic bits like a stealth iPod-compatible stereo and, less uselessly, a proper CB. Stay tuned.