Archive for the ‘SUV Off Road’ Category
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Author: So last weekend, my two friends and I decided to go hiking in the Mt. Tanzawa (丹沢山) area near Yokohama, not too far to the south of Tokyo. Fairly recently my friend Bryan bought himself a used 2000 Toyota Harrier (also known as a Lexus RX outside of Japan) so it seemed like a good opportunity to take it out for a drive and maybe get in a little time off-roading. The Toyota Harrier is a very comfortable, spacious vehicle and while it does have some off-road ability it’s not really designed for this purpose, which made us want to see how it would handle. Bryan, however was not very keen on the idea so we had to promise to take it easy, as he didn’t want his newly purchased SUV stuck in a ditch somewhere, which, although entirely understandable is not really in keeping with the spirit of adventure we are aiming for….oh well we tried not to roll down a hill.
It had been raining quite heavily the night before we left on our short trip so the roads were quite wet, the Harrier handled this with no problems as it filled the role of an all weather on road vehicle very admirably. After an hour or so of highway and street driving we found an area in which we could see how it handled the mud and bumps.
The Harrier doesn’t have a limited slip differential, so at one point the front left wheel got stuck and couldn’t get any traction, though after some trial and error we discovered that if you are very gentle on the accelerator then the traction control is really rather good and after a few seconds of spinning the central diff redistributed the power and we manged to escape the mud hole of certain doom…..ok that’s a slight exaggeration it was more the mud hole of mild annoyance but nonetheless escape we did.
We probably spent a good 45mins to an hour driving around muddy and bumpy tracks and the Harrier handled them with very little fuss. The mud it kicked up made it look very impressively off-roady when we arrived to begin our hike.
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