Toyota Land Cruiser Gets MONSTER Arctic Trucks Treatment!

If you feel that your Toyota Land Cruiser 250 isn't quite butch or capable enough for daily use, then you might want to consider one of these. This is an Arctic Trucks Land Cruiser 250 AT37. It's for those people who want a bit of extra wide arch chunk. So today, I'm going to be finding out exactly what it takes to take an already off-road capable car and turn it into something capable of complete off-road dominance. And we'll figure out that these things aren't just for the Arctic. Well, I'm here. Can't find their trucks anywhere. By looking around the UK operations workshops. Now Arctic Trucks, full disclosure, already has a little bit of history with Top Gear. You may recognise this Hilux. But this will be a short film because it's just a bolt-on lift kit and 37-inch tyres, right? Wrong. It's a bit more involved than that. Arctic Trucks started out in 1990 in Iceland as a special vehicles division of Toyota, built to cope with Iceland's extreme geography. So this car is going back to its roots as a Land Cruiser product. Albeit an LC250 Prado product. They also do the bigger more butch Land Cruisers if you need to not Prado. This particular model is a co-production between Arctic Trucks Mothership in Iceland, the UK operation and Toyota Africa distributor CFAO. And it's a bit more than a lift kit. Let's start with the really obvious bit because these are 37-inch tyres and you can choose between BFGoodrich all-terrain or mud terrain versions. And I prefer these mud terrains because they just look a bit more butch and they have dual valves. Now these help you inflate and deflate the tyres much more quickly, which is handy when you're off-road. And they're mounted on 17-inch Arctic Trucks Heritage wheels to go with the LC250's slightly retro feel. One detail I really like is that the hole in the wheel is very much like the A in Arctic Trucks. It's just a sweet little thing. To cover those massive wheels, you get these big wheel arch flares that you expect from Arctic Trucks. But if you poke around a little bit, you will notice these little recesses, which just have a tyre pressure guide in a minute that can house the for a central tyre inflation system, which is super handy when you're running about on mixed terrain. Then you've got beefier sidesteps, different mudguards, both front and rear, different badging and a multifunction receiver hitch to plug and play whatever you need to on the back. But the visuals are only half the story because if you lift the car 40 millimetres and stick 37-inch tyres on it, when they're on the road, they tend to be a bit rubbish. I've done this without any skill on cars over the years and I ended up with automotive blancmange, slightly dangerous automotive blancmange. So Arctic Trucks goes much further. The suspension system is actually a bespoke adjustable performance setup from a company called R53, who also incidentally supply bits to the GMA T50. So you've got much bigger dampers, match springs and hydraulic bump stops that go some way to mitigate all the squish from these massive tyres. Now I have driven lots of Arctic Trucks products on the road before and they are remarkably comfortable and unblobby on the road. To make it all fit, Arctic Trucks change a load of bits that you can't see, which is what makes it more of an expedition vehicle rather than just a bougie bit of wide arch tinsel. So they will re-profile the frame, they'll chop away the bodywork, even move parts of the transmission to maintain that relationship between ground clearance, articulation and still having a low centre of gravity. So you end up with the obvious stuff like bigger tyres and more clearance, but this is also a vehicle that's got a wider track and a longer wheelbase. So it should perform more like a manufacturer car on the road, but be much more capable off it. And I have to say this isn't some cut and shut job either. It costs just under 30 grand plus VAT to convert a standard Land Cruiser and it's proper, like it rolled straight off a Toyota production line. Just take a look. As for the inside, well not an awful lot has changed. There's still some slightly cheap plastics from the standard car, especially over here, but it's all been accented with some specific Arctic Trucks bits. So it's got different badging all around. You've got different binnacle, a specific gear selector, different sill plates, mats, and the view is very different, obviously. But let's face it, nobody's buying one of these for the interior, are they? There is, however, just one problem. They won't let me drive it, yet. So I decided to go and have a poke around Arctic Trucks UK to figure out what else they get up to. Okay, so hands up, Arctic Trucks has already proved itself to Top Gear. You may remember when TG Telly managed to get a Hilux to the Magnetic North Pole. Well that was an Arctic Trucks vehicle. And the company didn't stop there. Arctic Trucks, some trucks, have recorded the fastest overland journey to the South Pole, the longest distance expedition in polar history, the first expedition to drive through all seven continents, the first Antarctic crossing by passenger vehicle, and the first wheeled vehicle in history to travel from Magnetic North to the South Pole. If you're going to do silly things off-road, there are few companies that do it better. But they don't just do Toyotas these days, and you can buy them from dealerships and with proper warranties. Though they do all follow a very defined theme. So to find out more, we decided to ask this bloke. Hey, how are you doing? Good, thank you. I just wanted to have a quick chat to you about the operation that is Arctic Trucks. Because originally this company was a special vehicles version of Toyota in Iceland, wasn't it? Correct. So ATUK was obviously coming off the back of a few years before with Top Gear, obviously Top Gear in the UK. Those vehicles were donated by Toyota Great Britain. So there was always a link to the UK. And Arctic Trucks wanted to have more of a foothold on the global market. And obviously with the engineering supply chain, our kind of routes into the rest of the world, it was a lot easier to start doing that from the UK. And of course, there was the opportunity for a retail product that sort of took the design cues that derived from all those kind of bigger expedition vehicles and put it into a package where you could have a vehicle that had all of the Arctic Trucks DNA, but have it as a daily driver. But these are just the lift kit and big wheels, right? Well, yeah, contrary to popular opinion, actually, most of what we do with these vehicles, you can't see. So of course, you can lift vehicles out of the way and put big wheels and tires on most things. You can add bodywork and you can do all of those things to these vehicles. But the way that we do it, we're trying to maintain a lot of the original dynamics of the vehicle so that you get a vehicle that is durable. The dynamics in terms of driving stability are not sort of wrecked by six-inch lift and so on. So proportionally, if you take one of our conversions, it's probably maybe 65-70% you don't see. And the rest of it is what you do see, which is where you'll find comments like it's just bodywork and lift kit. When the off-road prowess, if you like, those things are a little bit of a given when you look at them. But when you take them out and you drive it on the road and you realise you can corner without rolling all over the place and so on, it's actually those things that surprise people the most. Because these things have already been tested in the massively extreme conditions. I mean, you've got a roll call of kind of world first as long as you are. Correct. But is that the point then, that if you got into one of them and drove it down the road, it would feel quite normal? Normal people can drive them, right? They don't need an HGV license. Absolutely. When you get inside and you start to drive, as I say, it's the thing that surprises people the most, that they don't need any kind of special skills. In fact, in terms of how they drive, particularly when you take it off-road, it's a bit of a leveller. You don't need loads of experience, like starting with a good base vehicle, which is already quite capable, and then adding the elements that we add actually enables you to go to places that most normal people wouldn't even dream of. Apart from the really extreme ones, which are obviously expedition vehicles, who buys them? Well, I mean, it's varied. Sometimes it's tradespeople, sometimes it's explorers, sometimes it's just people that want to look cool in a truck that has some kind of authentic underpinnings for capability. What happens if you have an Arctic truck and you break it? I mean, do they come with warranties, but it's actually allied to Toyota, isn't it, or whoever you're working with? Well, in most cases, that's exactly what happens. We like to go to the market in full concert with the manufacturer, but in any case, there's always full aligned warranty with all of our products. That tends to be, these days, five years, 100,000 miles, just like the base vehicle that you're in. But normal? Just normal. We like to try and make the journey for the customer the same as it would be for any other vehicle. So, if you were to describe Arctic trucks to someone who hadn't seen one and didn't understand what they were, tell me what an Arctic truck is. So, an Arctic truck will always start its life as an improvement on the base vehicle's capability. We don't do anything that doesn't improve the capability. Now, of course, you'll look at some of the styled elements and think, to your earlier point, it's just bodywork and a lift kit. But they're all functional. In most of the cases, we've increased the track. But to keep that safe, you want to cover the tires, so we need a flare. And if you're going to design a flare, you might as well put a little bit of time and effort into it being in keeping with the vehicle that you're building. So, if there are three words to describe an Arctic truck, tell me what they are. The phrase that we tend to use, it's slightly breaking the rules, but it's cool and capable. Okay, I get it. And what's next for the company then? Where does it go from here? Because all of your cars do have, forgive me, a bit of a theme. What do you do next? Do you work with different brands? Do you convert different cars? Or what's going on with it? Obviously, as the world moves on and we move more into an EV space, we've worked on some of those projects already with the Ford F-150 Lightning, the Nissan Ariya project. Yeah, I was going to say the Ariya that did North to South. So, obviously, all companies that work in this space will, at some point, need to move more towards those things. In terms of working with different brands and so on, we've got a history, although born from Toyota in Iceland, we've worked with many, many different brands over the years. But we'll continue to do what we do, which is trying to add more capability to vehicles to enable people to go where they want to go. A lot of people have decided that they want to take their kind of leisure time and their holidays into their own hands. So, more people are turning more towards vehicles that will allow them to do that without needing to get on a plane. And our vehicles are certainly the kind of vehicles that you can load up, you can use during the week, but then you get to the weekend exactly and then just go wherever it is you want to go and find that kind of peace and solace often in places where most people can't get to. So, it's about freedom? I think so. I think that's probably a good message. Freedom and capability with the assurance of the kind of warranties and so on that you'd normally find with the base vehicle. So, even if it's a hydrogen fuel cell powered by unicorn tears, there will end up being an Arctic Trucks product? Almost certainly. So, there you have it, a quick look around the Arctic Trucks Toyota Land Cruiser 250 AT37 and the company behind it. Now, all I've got to do is figure out a hardcore enough test for when they do let me drive it. Expedition to the Darien Gap, anyone? Let me know where you'd take it.