Incredibly enough, the Toyota Prado is Australia's top selling SUV. It looks Tonka tough and the market loves it. Stay tuned if the Simpson Desert's on your to do list, because here is Car Advice off-road tester, Paul Maric. Paul, just out of halfway through 2010, and more than 10,000 people have already bought the Toyota Prado that's staggering.
Oh, the numbers are incredible. It's hard to believe that is, you know, the best selling SUV, and rightfully so the Prado now comes with so many gadgets and gizmos that it's hard to keep up with it all.
There's cameras a-go-go. In fact, there's got to be more cameras than Channel 7 in a Prado.
It's like a movie that you've got cameras on the front, the side, and the rear. So, basically what that's for, when you're off-roading or you're in precarious situations where you have ruts and all this sort of stuff, the cameras look and see what's going on beside the car because it's often hard to see beyond the bonnet.
That sounds fine in theory, you know, but it could be very confusing with all those cameras and it might even be an not to use your eyes outside the car what's it like in practice? The cameras are really low quality unfortunately and they're fish eye and it's really hard to decipher what's going on you'd only ever use them in off-road situations and I thought the same as you, they're probably useless, until I tested them in theory when we were off-roading and they were surprisingly useful, you know exactly where the car's tracking off-road and you don't run the risk of falling into the ruts, which could be quite dangerous.
Fair enough, but could you use them for parking in the inner city? Ah, look, it's, it looks to park but it is quite easy and again the cameras really come into their own when it comes to parking such a big 4 wheel drive like that. Alright, now the Prada's got serious off-road capability Nobody doubt's that.
What you trade off though is on road poise and performance, and in practice, what's your impression of that. Even though the top spectacular that we drove comes with adjustable suspension. Even in the stiffer sports suspension mode, it's not that good on road. The handling is fairly average. The brakes there with a bit of work.
It's a really heavy car so it takes a lot of effort to stop it.
So if you own a Prado, maybe what you've got to do is adapt to its compromises because, you know, you get great off-road performance. You've got to acknowledge its on-road performance and maybe adapt down so that you're still driving within a margin of reasonable safety.
Exactly. It's definitely not a Range Rover Sport, so you really have to accommodate for it in that regard.
There's a petrol engine and a diesel engine. Which one's your preference?
You'd have to go with the diesel simply because of the fuel use over the petrol. The only downside to the diesel is that it really lacks torque. It's such a heavy car and it's hard to get the thing moving, so you really have to bury the foot to keep up with traffic.
That's fair enough,but which transmission, the manual or the automatic?
And I'd definitely go with the automatic. It's such a slick shifting gear box and really great to use with the tiptronic mode as well to extract the most from the car.
They can get as many as eight bums on seats. In the third row, if you've got kids, are they going to be sitting with their knees in their eyes or is it actually okay?
Well I Yeah, the work of sampling the third row, and I've got to tell you I feel perfectly fine, I wouldn't want to sit there for a three hour drive, but for anything up to an hour I'd be more than happy in the back of third row.
And what's the compromise in a luggage space if you do have eight bums on the seats?
It's not like a Tarago, thank goodness could you see do actually have luggage capacity and with the crack of the seats, its fold down electronically. So what you do is with the boot open press the button may drop away to give you infinite luggage space.
Tell us about the four wheel drive system?
The four wheel drive system is fairly complex so they have gone the way of Land Rover with a command selector. By the steering wheel, you can select the type of off-roading situation you're in, you know, straight from grass, grass wet grass, to mogul and ruts and the system will adapt to that and vary its stability control and traction control.
So you don't have to have a degree in off-roading. You just conform to the right icon and you know, you'll be right.
Exactly right. But even then it's a little bit confusing because you can only make changes when you're stationery. So you can't be moving at all, which is really frustrating.
If you were going to go off road in a serious way. Are there any changes you'd make to the car? Different tires, or what sort of thing would you do?
The standard tires are fairly impressive, we took it off road on sand driving and that, and it did a crack job. Besides from a flat which was very hard to change because of all the locks and nuts on the car, it did a great job with the standard issue tires.
Your sitting in the driver's seat, you're hanging onto the wheel, what do you like? And what do you dislike?
There's plenty of buttons around the Prada so it takes a little bit of time to get your head around everything. The car has so many features that you really need to sit down and think it all out before you do anything. But on that same token, you get a touch screen for the satellite navigation. It also does audio and climate.
So it's a fairly intuitive system that really anyone can use.
I guess buying a Prada is a bit like buying IBM it's hard to get it wrong but if you were in that space what competitors would you drive just to make sure you were doing the right thing when you're signed on the dotted line?
Competitors include things like Pajero, the Challenger. You have Pathfinder, even Patrol is a bit of a competitor. So There's a lot of other cars out there but look, this is really the all-rounder. It comes with everything that you need and it does a great job at it with Toyota reliability too.
And I guess maybe if you're in the shower room you might sit your backside in a Landcruiser and maybe in a Kluger and just make sure you're in the right segment.
Yeah, the Landcruiser is a massive step up, if that's even believable. The thing that Landcruiser picks up though is a great V8 diesel engine. You limit yourself with the Kluger in terms of off road ability, though. So I think the Prado is the perfect compromise between the two.
One of the reasons people buy SUV s is their towing capacity. How does the Prado add up there?
Well, three-ton towing capacity means you can pretty much tow anything. My only concern is that the diesel really doesn't have enough torque to get things moving in a bit of a hurry. So, while it has the towing capacity, I don't have much faith in the engine.
Thanks, Paul. That was Paul Maric and there you have it, the Prado Kakadu. You could visit Uluru and possibly tow it home, although not all that fast. You could read the full Prado review, download the specifications, add your comments and even get a quote from a Toyota dealer, just follow the links on this page.
