Land Cruiser 79 Camper VS Troopy Camper. What's better? | 4xOverland

i've had a lot of people commenting on the previous videos particularly the last two or three uh asking is it better than the trip carrier and some saying it's not as good as the troop carrier which was a bit strange i mean how do you know i don't know but um the jury is out i imagine that some things is going to be better and other things it's going to be not as good is it better than the troopy um ask me that in a couple of days on our trip through the pilbara gun and i often discussed the merits of our new camper conversion and made comparisons with the troop carrier we recorded many of those thoughts along the route here are some of our conclusions i'm andrew simpion-white join me as i share my passion for building four-wheel drive trucks and traveling to the remotest parts of the world [Music] the aspects of it that i'm really loving the other aspects of it that uh are not as intuitive as the troop he was this is much more of a beast in the sense that you've got to slap her around a bit you know you've got to manhandle her in a sense because um so much bigger and what have you the troopy was was very simple to use very light touch the trip carrier was pretty perfect there were so few things that i had to tweak i did tweak some things but there were so few things because actually my trip carrier the one that i bought in australia was actually my second troop carrier and the first troop carrier built in south africa and i was able to make some reasonably well i'd say major changes to the interior layout to make it work move the fridge to the other side the storage changed lots of things changed what's happened here is it is the same this is my first troopy it's my first camper and the fact that we have to swap things around and change things around is to me act very positive because how do you get it right the first time round we would have been enormously lucky to got it right the thing though is i think that the changes we can make to this are not complicated it's not like we have to start a start and buy another troop carrier another camper to give this another go so mach 1 and mark 2 will be perfect having driven over 4 000 kilometers and have now spent nine nights camping with the stretched 79 aussie dream tourer camper i am able to i think be able to present to you the pros and cons over the troop carrier let's start with driving its driving manners our remarkably similar to the troop carrier those of you who have driven the 79 series 76 series and 78 troop carrier will know that they are all similar but they do have some differences in that the different wheelbases affect the ride and affect the directional stability the directional stability of this with its extra long wheelbase is better than the trip carrier it has a better straight line stability remember i have corrected the rear axle made the rear axle wider which improves directional stability in all of these vehicles and the roll over cornering turning remember troop carriers are quite top-heavy they tend to lean a lot there's no difference here the most obvious difference though is maneuverability here demonstrated with turning radius comparison a u-turn takes approximately one traffic lane more with the stretched 79 ride on corrugations on this is actually remarkably good as well and i managed to with my troop carrier get that ride good using bp51 shock absorbers and all many mu springing this has terrain tamer springing and the turrentamer pro shocks and the ride on this i'm very happy with i think on very very rough roads the troop carrier has an edge i think but i haven't driven it over extremely rough well i've done a few but my my inkling says that the troopy is a little bit better and i think it's got to do with weight my troop carrier topped out at 3 30 kilograms fully loaded with this fully loaded i'm sitting at 3 900. so you're talking 600 plus additional kilograms to lug this lot around you're going to pay for that and that's going to be mostly fuel consumption from what i can see i'm using a good between two and three extra liters every 100 kilometers that to me is significant what's going to be better off-road troopy is there's no question about it it has a shorter wheelbase it has a better breakover angle angle so the breakover angle with that vehicle is not terrible but it's not particularly good either but the real question is is it good enough for my purposes this remains a question that i need answered for myself i have uh with me a nicely equipped uh hilux very nicely eclip crypt uh nissan triton uh the other is mitsubishi little suv and um i guess that if um i can keep up with him then hey i'm gonna use a different line all right i've been in two wheel drive because i've been needing to make very tight turns and uh now i'm in four i want to go into four low seconds i've got some control [Music] this exercise taught me that the vehicle is good off-road traction is excellent ride on undulations excellent after all it's a land cruiser its shortcomings will be similar to the troop carriers in that it is tall wide much wider than the troop carrier and its reduced turning radius is going to make it a challenge on very twisty terrain but its disadvantage off-road without question is going to be load distribution much more weight on the rear axle means that on soft ground it's going to be at a disadvantage again how much of a disadvantage on the channel the first time i took this vehicle off-road i got stuck in soft sand and a lot of people said oh it's absolutely terrible off-road no it isn't that's nonsense getting stuck is part of off-roading i got out extremely easily i'm learning this new vehicle and arriving at conclusions as i am experiencing it is it as good off-road as the troop carrier no is its off-road performance unacceptable not even close the more i drive it off-road the better it becomes off-road because i'm learning it its off-road performance is more than adequate as a long distance overland remote tourer now i wonder the other day i got stuck in a riverbed and i'm sure i'll get lots of criticism saying oh you should have lit down your tires before crossing the riverbed yes you're absolutely right but see i'm not clairvoyant i can't look at a surface and know immediately if it's going to i almost got through i almost got through but you're right you should let your ties down first yes but what happened there was that i got stuck and i stopped and i knew i have enough experience to say stop right now you can get out of this little bit of digging two minutes of digging and you're out of it because i didn't spin my wheels and get myself in but the thing that was running through my mind the whole time was would the troopy have got through with the reduced weight would it have got through and my gut says no it would have been the same almost exactly the same if i had been fully loaded in the troop carrier if there was a difference it's small it's not a significant difference in that kind of terrain the moment i take it on to dunes where i'm cresting dunes yes the troop carrier will no doubt have an advantage because it's got a better breakover angle because of course remember i built this as an overland tourer that was his primary objective now when i built the troop carrier i built it as a overland tourer almost exactly the same approach i had with this but for one major thing and that was to do something about the troop carrier's lack of versatility see the troop carrier being a van you've got a big open space in the back in in which to put stuff carry stuff the moment you turn it into a dedicated overland tourer you're using up all of that space with a bench to store stuff your battery systems packing stuff for food the bed all of the bits and pieces that make it an overland tourer unless you've decided you know developed some cunning way which i hadn't of making that stuff interchangeable or removable easily removable then you've turned a useful load carrying van into an overland tourer it is then an overland tourer and that is obviously not what i've done here and here is where i see the biggest and without question the most significant advantage over building a ute over a van i used to use my troop carrier as my daily driver together with our other car so it wasn't used a lot and i didn't commute with it but it wasn't too long too cumbersome had a reasonable turning radius visibility around the vehicle was good enough for me to be able to use it around town this with its camper on the back isn't visibility out the back around the sides is poor of course it's very high and the turning radius when compared to the 79 the 79 turning radius is poor anyway but manageable this is poor and barely manageable the length of these two vehicles is deceptive when you look at the troop carrier it looks a lot more compact and much much shorter than the camper but actually it isn't the length you're talking this much longer that's all what makes this look very big and very bulky and in fact it gives it the impression that it is very very heavy is this here which is just shell it's an egg shell to allow easier access so impressions you can always trust them with the trip carrier it's being converted into an overlander if i wanted to go and put something in the back carry something it was hopeless it was it was useless it had no space in the back where this is that i can remove the camper and i now have a ute yes i have a ute with a poor turning radius but when the u this is off my visibility is very good i look out the back visibility is perfectly acceptable or the only thing that i've lost is some turning radius the overall length of the vehicle compared to a standard 79 here is 90 millimeters longer only that much longer because i have moved the wheel back i haven't moved this back this has stayed where it is in fact that's only 90 millimeter longer than the standard so my departure angle is improved but the o vehicle's overall length only by this much which is really nothing so what i have gained is a vehicle that i can use for many many tasks at the expense of turning radius another advantage i thought of with this over the trip area everything in the troop carrier was had to find its own place and be strapped now anything loose you would hear it moving around in the back so you could have nothing loose over a road like this whereas in the camper you know we basically just throw those little steps in the chairs are chucked in they can't go anywhere but they will be moving around right now we can't hear them nope imagine all the little rattles that'll drive me absolutely up the wall busy going on right now and they're wriggling away go for it i can't hear you my competitive cell is the best way it is and i did carrier manage remove all of that it was a bit of an effort but i i can't stand rattles and i managed to get in a rattle-free vehicle um but it's an advantage i don't have to pay too much attention to all those final details when doing my packing but you know what's so nice about this yeah normally when you arrive at a campsite you're kind of thinking oh shoot now i've got to get my bed sorted out before i do anything so you don't want to be foraging around in the dark and you don't have to here there's a couple of and even the bed is made yeah you know the pillows are even less work than there was an entropy you had to do a little more work well with the pillows but not much yeah and the kitchen is our food access is all is the big big thing it's not we well sorted one of the things that i really like about the camper compared to the troopy is the the canvas backing because it's not a a flip up the kit you've got the canvas backing and it's like a headboard so in the evenings if we don't have a fire because in australia you can't always have a fire uh bushfires are a real prop you know bushfires as in the whole country burns down are real problems so if the wind is really bad we don't make a fire and it's not much fun sitting outside without a fire so we'll come up here and we'll read or watch a movie and it's really nice because we can sit back in bed as if it is a bed which has really been very very nice as compared to any other rooftop tent that i've slept in and while i'm complaining about arms and legs and all of that i have to say i suffer terribly from claustrophobia and i've had instances in rooftop tents where in the middle of the night i've had to break out i was ready to just tear the canvas apart and andrew heard the panic in my voice he did not argue and i said i am getting out of here and we you know we've ended up pitching ground tents and what have you not moment's thought about claustrophobia in here you've got all the space around you so for me this has been a godsend because even sometimes in the troop carrier i just get that tightness in my chest so this has been perfect so compared to the trip carrier the bed here is uh so i'm more airy than the troop carrier where it's lifting up like that although the length is a little bit shorter the width feel it feels a bit wider and it feels much higher it feels it's just a nicer place to sleep but now the big advantage is here if somebody is in bed somebody can still be down working in the camper and have space to move around as well with the troop carrier once the bed's down there is no space left in the back of the trip carrier to for anybody to do anything there's some things that i absolutely love about this vehicle that the troopy just didn't come close with and that is the fact that this is a double cab i know some people think we were nuts to buy a double cab and then immediately take off the seats what's the point of that oh for people space hugs you know who needs space for stuff it's been fantastic i love this space i think we can get in here now because the door but i've got all the space and all the dirty washing is there and i keep my laptop there and the bug out bag is there and it's there you don't need it it's out the way it's not in the tent the trippy never had anything like that so you were kind of tripping over that stuff really in um the troopy so this was genius and if we can ever take um my dog bella with us um on a trip probably down to esperance or something like that uh her car seat would fit in there perfectly so just love it something that is ah i love seem to love a lot of things but i really love art the drawers for clothes i'd hoped that in the true i suppose we could have turned some of the drawers in the troopy into um drawers for clothes but there was limited storage space in the troopy so that wouldn't really work because you were using that for food and for for other things but i i'm really enjoying having um how did you carry clothes in the troopy in a bag and the trouble with the bag is you were always moving the bag out the way because you had that narrow um so if there were two of you and you both had a bag you were kind of having to move that stuff around quite a bit i think when it's all said and done i'm actually preferring this vehicle more than the troopy i know andrew wants me to be very balanced and um yeah but i like the gull wings i like this access um okay things that i don't like the vehicle is so big it is i mean it's colossal in a parking lot or there's no way the trooper you could use as a daily driver which was really quite nice you know it could just nip down somewhere in the troopy you're not nipping anywhere in this thing um that's so that with the camper on it makes it pretty much this is what it is another thing i preferred on the trip carrier it the location of the shower because um you had the interior going internal gull wing a shelf which was actually the fridge and it was easier to access i'd put my towel there soaps and things like that it was just easier this is a bit fumbly fiddly in terms of the shower i'm gonna i'm gonna have to get something to hang on here to sort out that problem it's a small problem but it's it's it's there the other thing is that the max tracks the maxtrax um on the trip carrier used that the quick pitch maxtrax side bracket that would flop down to be a table so that instant table was in ultra fast which was really nice and accessing the max tracks up there is fiddly again fiddly when compared to the max tracks table mounted to the side of the troop carrier not a big thing but it is something on reflection really i say it's too big and it's a handful and all of that but everything i love about it the size the space the ease of use the accessibility all of those things are a product of that space and size and so what i'm saying really doesn't make sense i guess um because you can't have one without the other so if there was a way we could make it into a tardis that it was small to start or like one of those harry potter tents you know it looks like nothing from the outside hermione's beaded bag that's your next project andrew some people have asked why didn't i just go uh earth cruiser route based on any vehicle daily or the fuso or you know there's five ton payload trucks and i could have all the comforts well i'm not ready to go that size because of the limitations of size what i try to do here is to jump size wise one up from troop carrier because if you think about it we start with small station wagons and then we go to slightly larger station wagons and that levels off at the land cruiser 200 the you know nissan patrol make a big one they're not many left and then we go on to utes and we put something on the back of a ute like a canopy uh with a rooftop tent or something like that and then the next stage is a large ute with a camper which is what i've done here beyond that it's the considerably bigger there's a big jump i was not and i'm still not prepared to jump that high and the reason is that while comfort is important to me it's not necessarily a priority for me but gwyn and i i think the priority is being mobile and being able to uh shoot lots of pictures and take lots of videos and go where we want without the limitations of a very large vehicle and this is bigger than the troop carrier which sits between ute and and and u-10 camper you know it's a van so it really is like a large station wagon i think this is a fantastic compromise before going really big for us it's not about the camping it's about the destination and a lot of the places that we would want to go to you can't take a big vehicle like that you're very restricted you you're far more limited in taking a really big vehicle imagine trying to do that through some of the parks in africa they won't even let you in they won't let big vehicles in but that's not really the problem in australia and north america as much as it is in africa i don't think the comfort is such a high priority for us yeah but it is important that's otherwise we would have just stuck with a troop carrier because it's perfect but we wanted more comfort than the troop carrier yeah and the payment the pay and and other people have suggested you know why don't you just tow a no tow a caravan can you imagine that i'd rather give up i'd rather give up the will to live than see this is why we get on well um then if you're taking a caravan then it's either children are the priority and they've got to be super super comfort comfortable and therefore comfort is the priority because children do bear play a big part in this yes they do okay but we've traveled with our kids in a station wagon with a rooftop tent and a ground tent and they have absolutely loved it we haven't needed to pull a trailer of any kind but the demands of family mean for many many people i need a daily driver and i need a camping solution to a trailer so i understand the need for that yeah it's that compromise and and for for some for probably a lot of people it's the the compromise of if i don't provide my family with enough comfort they won't come with me so yes i think so and i think what we've tried to do here is still keep the over landing dream alive but providing enough of those basic comforts that yes and the ode and the over landing dream that you speak of is exactly what we've done on this trip we've found we have not followed the routes that that we're haven't been to a single tourist site not one i'm sure they're beautiful and we will be seeing them when we get to the coast we will be seeing some grey nomads and some camper trailers and then that's absolutely fine but this allows us to do more which is this and i prefer this having not seen my troop carrier for a year my when i first saw it my heart left and then i parked my new one next to it and i have to be honest i'm not in love with my new vehicle i like it it's fun it's great yes but it's not a love affair and that's a problem and that's because the main trouble is it just doesn't look as good as the trophy and that i can do nothing about

Channel: 4xoverland

Views: 193,719

Keywords: 4wd, 4x4, overland, expedition, off-road, Andrew St Pierre White, 4xoverland, Land Cruiser, toyota land cruiser, land cruiser 78 camper, land cruiser 78 series, land cruiser 78 off road, land cruiser 79 series, land cruiser 79 off road, land cruiser 79 series modified, 4wd trucks, toyota troopy, toyota troop carrier, toyota troopy camper, camper, camper van

Id: Uagnz3RToZs

Length: 30min 3sec (1803 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 21 2020