What Makes the Perfect Vehicle for Overlanding?

If you’re going to drive halfway around the world, you’re going to need a solid vehicle. Figuring out exactly what vehicle that should be would be the first challenge I’d encounter for my overland journey.

Ask an overlanding forum what vehicle to buy, and you’ll have an answer within the hour. Ask again a week later, and you’ll get a different answer.

There are threads running forty pages deep on this exact question. Land Cruiser versus Land Rover. Diesel versus petrol. Roof tent versus camp trailer. It’s the internet, so naturally everyone is an expert, and everyone is certain that whatever they did is the correct way to do it.

Days into my research, I quickly realised everyone on these forums had already bought their vehicle. What they were offering wasn’t advice, it was a defence of their own decision. The only consensus I found was that consensus wasn’t coming.

So I stopped reading forums and worked out what actually matters to me.

Goldilocks

The first decision is size, and it’s a bit of a Goldilocks problem.

Go small — like a motorbike — and you’re signing up to live out of saddlebags and find somewhere you can pitch a tent in order to sleep every night. (And that’s ignoring the fact that I don’t actually know how to ride a motorbike).

Go too big — one of those expedition trucks built on an ex-army chassis — and you’ve bought a vehicle that costs a fortune to ship, drinks fuel by the barrel, and won’t fit down half the streets you came to see.

Before settling on the obvious, I gave some thought to the less obvious. My first idea was a Thai tuk tuk — cheap, simple to maintain, and with a novelty value I’ll admit appealed to me. It has one drawback: it’s open to the elements on all sides. Charming in the dry season. Considerably less so for the other half of the year.

From there I looked at the Suzuki Jimny, a small and relatively affordable four-wheel drive. The problem with the Jimny was arithmetic. You cannot legally bolt a 45-kilogram rooftop tent to a roof rated for 30. Even if you’d risk it, the rough roads of Central Asia would certainly put strain on the roof.

So, a pickup truck it is (or a ute to my friends back home). The deciding factor is the tray on the back, which I plan to add a slide-in camper to — somewhere to sleep that isn’t a hotel, and isn’t the front seats.

Four Wheel Drive?

Next is whether it needs four-wheel drive. Plenty of people have made this kind of trip in a two-wheel-drive vehicle and done it perfectly well. I have no particular plans to go off-roading; the route is mostly roads, of varying optimism, but roads.

I want the four-wheel drive anyway. Not because I expect to need it often, but because the few times I do, I’d rather have it than a good story about the time I didn’t. It costs more, but it’s worth it.

New or Old?

Then comes the questions where gut is more important than fact; How new? How many kilometres? And how much are you prepared to spend?

Spend less now, and you accept that something will break, probably somewhere with no parts and no English. Spend more now, and you’re betting that newer means more reliable — a bet that holds right up until it doesn’t.

There’s no winning this one. There’s only choosing which kind of regret you’d prefer.

I’m leaning newer, for reasons that have nothing to do with reliability. There are 40,000 kilometres between here and where I’m going. That is a great many hours in the drivers seat, and I’d like a good soundtrack to accompany me. Whether that’s the classics or a podcast, both seem better than just me and my own thoughts. That means Apple CarPlay, which means newer.

Navigation matters for the same reason. A modern screen and a working map are the difference between reaching my destination and spending an afternoon lost in the back streets of Chongqing, trying to decode directions.

Perfection

Add it all up and the perfect overlanding vehicle turns out to be a fiction. What exists instead is a list of compromises you can live with, in the rough shape of a four-wheel-drive pickup with low-ish kilometres and a working stereo.

Now I just have to find one within budget.

How hard could that be?