Do you like your job? Do you go to work with a smile? Are you eager for Monday morning? Alright alright, I was just asking. Because it’s hard not to imagine that that is exactly the life of some of Jeep’s engineers and stylists.

So here’s your job brief. We want you to come up with eye-catching, nay, outlandish concept vehicles. No, not just on your screen, you then get a hand in actually making real, working versions. Do they have to be sensible and production-ready? No, but if you could keep it halfway realistic that would be great. Oh yes, and there’s another
thing too.

Every Easter we want you to take them to Moab in Utah and show them in their natural surroundings to a wildly enthusiastic audience. Then you can drive them around the stunning rocks, and then stop for some food and drink in the early year sunshine while you chat to the public, most of whom own Jeeps.

Read the full article in the May issue –

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Ironman 4×4 is well known among off-road enthusiasts in the UK, with a wide range of accessories allowing customers to enhance their vehicles and prep them for work, play, camping and expeditions. The Australian company has long been seen as one of the go to suppliers for Japanese vehicles, in particular Toyota – and its importer in the USA recently built a trio of concepts designed to demonstrate its wares, with two of them being from the world’s highest-selling 4×4 maker.

We’ll look at the more obvious choice, a Tundra full-size double-cab, in a future issue. But here’s a Toyota that’s very familiar back home – albeit not in this form. ‘More and more people are using crossovers and CUVs to take them on adventures,’ explains Ironman. ‘Because of this, Ironman 4×4 has outfitted a Toyota RAV4 with numerous parts and
accessories to show the vehicle’s potential as an adventure platform.

In America, the RAV4 comes with 2.5-litre petrol engine which can be a specced to drive either the front or all four wheels and, in the latter form, combined with an electric motor to create the RAV4 Hybrid. It’s fundamentally the same vehicle we know and love over here.

Read the full article in the May issue –

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Lifeless eyes stared back at me from the other side of the glass, their hollowed and blackened recesses screaming out in anguish. A web of fissures radiated from a dime-sized hole in their stained and hairless temporal lobe.

A second pair of empty sockets to the left, another to the right, another above, another below. Stepping back revealed thousands of soiled skulls, each defaced in similar fashion – the remains of entire villages. Beneath my feet, bone fragments, teeth and clothes leached up through the muddy soil, gruesome evidence of a horrific chapter in the annals of a small country in South-East Asia. This was Choeung Ek, the most notorious killing field of the Khmer Rouge and the final resting place of 8895 innocent Cambodian souls.

No story about Cambodia would be complete without mention of Pol Pot and his genocidal regime which, in the second half of the 1970s, murdered as many as two million of its own citizens. But I had come to embrace where it is today, absorb its vibrant and animated culture and delve into what its future holds – while exploring its rich back-country aboard a fleet of Land Rover Defenders.

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We test drove the Mustang Mach-E a couple of years ago and weren’t hugely impressed
by it. So a second opportunity to try an example from the current model year, over the same roads as last time, was
very welcome.

So too was the vehicle’s cabin – which was much nicer than we remembered, especially the dash. The upper surface is still all hard plastic, but then there are fabric, carbon and leather effect elements with full-width heating and air-con outlets sandwiched between them. Then there’s an enormous tablet-style screen in the middle of it all – actually, it’s more like an upright laptop than a tablet – with a rather cool multi-function dial housed within it. You can’t help but feel that it’s a bit of an ‘anything you can do’ pop at Tesla, but whatever it is it looks the business.

There’s a comparatively small digital dash along from it, visible through the steering wheel, and between these and a
couple of buttons on the steering wheel that’s your lot. It’s very minimalist in this way – but then you’re surveying it from a big, comfy driver’s seat with soft, supple leather trim and plenty of leg, elbow and head room, so it’s not short on old-school luxuries either.

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The antiquated and overloaded electricity grid in the UK received a tiny piece of good news lately. Which is that we’ve got one fewer electric vehicle to keep powered up. Or, to put it another way, hurrah! The very first all-electric Series IIA Land Rover has been shipped off to the USA, showcasing as it does Britain’s determination to honour classic vehicles while being environmentally responsible.

The two key players here are Everrati, rom Oxfordshire, and ‘Craig’ who owns a corporate and equestrian law practice
which allows him to collect classic cars to drive around his polo fields in Florida. Symbolically, the handover of the vehicle took place at the Grand Champions Polo Club in Wellington, Florida. And it’s not at all symbolic that the venue is referred to as ‘The Disneyland of Polo’.

Craig talked about protecting the environment and sustainability, which is presumably why he bought an old Land Rover, had it totally rebuilt with electric drivetrain and then had it shipped or indeed
flown across the Atlantic Ocean.

Read the full article the May issue

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