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 wa ..read more

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 ..read more

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 ..read more

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 t ..read more

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 Flo ..read more

Isuzu is on a mission to enhance the D-Max’s image as a lifestyle vehicle in this country. And, as usual, it’s doing a good job of it, with the range-topping V-Cross building an ever-stronger presence in the sales charts. A pick-up range needs to be built on a solid foundation, though, and that’s where the likes of the DL20 come in. A couple of years ago, Isuzu widened the options in its line-up allowing this model to be ordered with an automatic gearbox – and that’s what we have here. The D-Max has also had a mild facelift in the relatively recent past. This amounts to a more aggressive loo ..read more

A vehicle with one of the longest running names in the market, the Suzuki Vitara has been coming to the UK since 1991. It’s changed a lot in that time, of course – from the Vitara to the Grand Vitara and back again, through various sizes, shapes, body configurations and chassis set-ups and, notably, in and thankfully back out of a deep trough immediately after turning its back on old-school off-road tech. What it has become is a very sound choice at the budget end of the SUV market – and it became sounder than ever a couple of years ago with the introduction of a full hybrid engine. This mates ..read more

How many hobbies should a person have? The answer appears infinite. Certainly in my own case, in addition to green lane activities. I birdwatch, help run a charity and do a load of other, sometimes questionable things. The most questionable of all is a love of fact checking. You know the kind of stuff – using Facebook to sensitively correct misunderstandings about stuff like immigration, electric vehicles and especially the flat earthers. And in that latter case I have a particular speciality, having spent many happy hours arguing with many Americans about the nature of our planet. One thing ..read more

Little more than a day’s drive from Britain, the Alps of northern Italy combine a sublime landscape with a rich military history that dates back to Napoleonic times – and has provided a network of rough mountain trails that are perfect for exploring by 4×4. When it comes to adventure, I consider myself genre-fluid (yes genre…). My adventures have thus far consisted of climbing mountains, hunting, scuba diving, getting up close and personal with dangerous animals and most recently riding across the Sahara Desert on top of a freight train carrying iron ore – so I certainly don’t consider myself ..read more

It’s a strange name isn’t it? Anyone who has watched real-world giant pandas for any length of time will come away astonished that they’re not extinct. Sure they look all cute and cuddly but they’re also clumsy, often helpless and have a ridiculous diet. They’re bears, for heaven’s sake, with a digestion set up for eating meat, yet they eat only bamboo shoots, which have low nutritional value and the pandas aren’t good at extracting even that. So they have to eat up to 38kg of bamboo shoots and leaves a day. It doesn’t leave a lot of time for personal development or musings on the meaning of ..read more