Iceland's fat-tyred flyer

Iceland is a rock made of lava thrusting out of the North Atlantic Ocean just south of the Arctic Circle. It’s a devastatingly beautiful place in a savagely grand way.

Vast fields of solidified lava jut and angle, covered by green moss. Sheer cliffs rear up behind the black-sand beaches. In the distance snow-capped mountains are topped in heavy, grey cloud. The difficult climate and geology mean tree growth is sparse and stunted. On a clear day you can see just about forever.

But not today. We’re here in the height of summer and it’s about 18 degrees C and trying to rain. At least the sun never goes down, although it rarely breaks through the cloud. In winter, it struggles to come up and the rain turns to snow and slush that covers much of the island.

No wonder Arctic Trucks came into existence. Who? Well remember the Top Gear television show special where Clarkson and company drove to the magnetic north pole in fat tyred Toyota HiLuxes? They were built by Arctic Trucks.

Basically, most Icelanders – there are only 325,000 of them – love their skiing, shooting, fishing, hiking and the great outdoors. Years ago, they discovered the best way to navigate their challenging landscape was by putting huge tyres on their 4x4s.

“When people discovered the bigger tyres could float on snow at lower pressures, it changed a lot of things and demand became very strong,” Arctic Trucks Chairman Emil Grimsson told motoring.com.au.

“In Iceland you will have gravel, you will have snow, you will have lava. So if you have a tracked vehicle, it can do snow but you will destroy it if you go into the open area of gravel and so on.

“All of a sudden you had the opportunity to travel all over the country in winter-time.”

Grimsson established what eventually became Arctic Trucks in 1990. It has emerged over the years as the biggest and most successful operator in this unique Iceland auto ‘industry’, to the extent it now has significant exports including military contracts, a second manufacturing base in Norway and, as it moves into hot weather markets, an interest in offering its products in Australia.

Arctic Trucks already spends a lot of time in the southern hemisphere supporting parties trekking to the South Pole. Last summer it was a bicycle record attempt, next summer it’s going to be a tractor. It also sells 4x4 and 6x6 versions of the HiLux to polar scientific expeditions and the like. It has more than 200,000km worth of experience on the Antarctic plateau.

At home in Iceland the Arctic Trucks crew also offer guided tourism drives, or will rent you one of their mini monster trucks and send you on your way.

Although it does dabble in other brands, the origins of Arctic Trucks are inextricably linked with Toyota and the vast majority of the conversions it
performs are of the HiLux ute and the Prado SUV, both of which are – of course – very big sellers in Australia. Anyway, it’s a strong enough link for

Toyota Australia to take a group of Australian motoring journalists to Iceland for a drive.

And after doing just that here’s a simple piece of advice – put Iceland and a drive of an Arctic Truck on your bucket list.

There’s just something completely and childishly pleasurable about squishing along a rough dirt track and blasting through a series of river crossings in a HiLux high-riding on 38-inch tyres with just 10psi in them.

That low air pressure is crucial to just why these things work so well off-road. They absorb the rotten ride dished up by the rocky and deeply scarred tracks and can clamber up and down steep climbs quite effortlessly. On snow the pressures are dropped as low as 5psi!

Because we were in Iceland in summer we didn’t get the chance to do that, but we did drive on a beach with quite loose sand that gave us the chance to feel something similar. And the Arctic Trucks just floated over the top like a power boat on water, never seriously threatened by the conditions.

One thing you are never short of is steering feel, with the wheel constantly twitching and jiggling in your hands. And that is also just as true on-road as off-road. There’s no surprise that there is a ponderousness to black-top behaviour and it could get interesting if an Icelandic sheep came bolting onto the road and you were forced to try and make an emergency swerve-and-recover manoeuvre at speed.

But what is also very noticeable is a decent level of refinement. Yes the Arctic Tyres-branded rubber – made for the company in China to its specifications – does produce some roar, but it’s not as bad as you might expect at the 90km/h national speed limit.

Stock cabins – pretty much as they left the factory – also help deliver a quality feel. The main difference is the additional height you look down on the world from. Arctic Trucks also makes the conscious decision not to play around inside the engines, so performance is familiar even though the macho looks suggest a few hundred extra kilowatts would be appropriate.

Where Arctic Trucks really goes to work is the ladder frame chassis and suspension. In the early days, says Grimsson, cowboy operators created dynamic horror stories by just raising the body and shoving the tyres underneath.

“The cars became unsafe with a lot of steering and braking issues … we wanted to do something better and eventually we found out the only way to do this in a way we would like to keep the balance of the car was to keep the lift down.

“So what we had to do was to start rebuilding the body around the tyres.”

If you order the 38 or 44 inch tyres then extending the wheelbase is part of the package. The suspension is extended and the steering geometry is also altered. The 35 and 33-inch options require less work.

Bodywork is also cut into and new fender flares that look like they came off a racing sedan are applied to accommodate the rubber. There is also alteration to the diff gearing, Australian ARB air lockers can be added and the 44-inch option also gets a second ultra-low low range.

Suspension development has included a coil rear-end for the HiLux, replacing the standard leaf springs. One of the cars on the drive was testing Fox dampers as part of a new collaboration.

The popular 38-inch conversion of the HiLux costs about US$30,000 on top of the of the standard car’s retail price. The 6x6 is about 150,000 Euros.

Our day of driving ended with a loop along some dirt and bitumen roads back to the capital Reykjavik. We’d probably never been more than hour out of
town, yet we could have been 1000km from civilisation. Along the way we stopped at the Krysuvik hot springs where grey, sludgy water blooped to the
surface emitting a nose-crinkling sulphurous odour.

From here we could see from the mountains to the sea and a vast green panorama in between. It’s a country calling out to be explored and no doubt the Arctic Trucks HiLux can take on just about any part of it.