It doesn't take much to go bush in your SUV

In the rush to urbanise the SUV, it's easy to forget that its roots lie with vehicles conceived for traversing rough terrain. Originally, that high ground clearance wasn't just for getting the passenger side up on the footpath in narrow city streets, or chucking U-turns over median strips. Nor was it that a high seating position is just for looking over the top of traffic jams, and that four-wheel drive system wasn't invented to help out on suburban streets in the rain.

Those vehicles were bush-beaters and rock-eaters, far more competent and comfortable on cross-country courses and paddocks than hard, smooth bitumen.
It was in the late 1960s that someone came up with the idea of a vehicle equally capable on and off the road. First released in 1970, Charles Spencer ('Spen') King's Range Rover had the niche all to itself for a quarter of a century. By the early 1990s, others were cottoning on, turning the Rangie into arguably the most influential vehicle of the last half-century.

The genre it spawned -- the so-called 'sports utility vehicle' -- has achieved huge penetration across the global auto market.

Virtually every major brand, upmarket and mass market, has an SUV line-up to parallel its other models, large, medium and small. Even Porsche attributes its very survival against some daunting financial odds to its hugely successful SUV, the Cayenne.

But we digress. With increasing acceptance in urban markets, many's the city and suburban SUV buyer who remains unaware of just how far their shiny new high-rider can take them off the beaten track. With each new generation, that heritage becomes harder to see, especially now the genre's come full-circle, with models like the RAV, the ix35, Mitsubishi's ASX and Nissan's Dualis dispensing entirely with AWD in base specification.

But make no mistake, that extra ground clearance and those short overhangs give even light-duty SUVs the potential for considerable prowess not just over dirt but steeply sloping dirt, corrugations, rocky stuff and soft sand.

"In fact their weight advantage can allow them to outperform their heavier counterparts in some conditions," said former country policeman turned off-road tour specialist Mick McCulkin, to a group of media gathered at the new 4WD test track at Sydney's Eastern Creek raceway complex.

McCulkin was there in his capacity as user-spokesperson for 4WD accessories specialist Bushranger, which turned on a master-class demonstration recently to show skeptical scribes how it's done. "These little vehicles are lighter and more nimble than LandCruisers, Patrols and Defenders," he continued. "They sit on top of the surface rather than plowing through it, so they leave a lighter footprint on the terrain, too."

BUDGET BUSH-BASHING
It doesn't even take a huge outlay to gear up for the weekend sea- or tree-change to which the ads for so many of these vehicles used to allude, be it amid the peace of a deserted beach or the thrill of a bit of paddock-bashing.

For less than $1000 you can pack the gear you need to start tackling sand dunes, mud holes and crook roads knowing you'll be able to extricate yourself should you get stuck (for as long as the vehicle remains upright and startable).

The basic off-road kit for such trips is pretty self-evident. How can things go wrong? Short of tearing out sumps and other problems beyond redress by drivers, most likely the vehicle's going to pop a tyre on something hard and sharp, or dig a hole in soft sand or mud from which it can't escape under its own steam.

For all but the worst of such situations, all you need is a spare tyre (or two), a tyre repair kit and basic recovery gear. The latter starts with a snatch strap – that's a piece of heavy-duty webbing forming the first connecting section between your distressed SUV and a tree or another vehicle.

And a winch.

Most light SUVs don't have the wherewithal to mount a heavy duty winch under the front bumper. But then they're not likely to need heavy duty pulling power to get them out of the kind of spots they're going to get into -- we're talking about weekend fun here, not the search for Osama.

For the purposes of pulling a sub-two tonne compact SUV up five metres of embankment, a hand winch, twenty metres of steel cable and enough elbow grease to induce plenty of potty-mouthed recrimination will do the trick.

Time constraints restricted the media demo to pulling a Subaru Forester up over less than a metre of soft road base, but it was enough to demonstrate what can be achieved with Bushranger's little Extracta winch. If that was anything to go by, by the time you've rowed the ultra-low geared device enough to inch the thing up and out of its predicament, you'll be thinking twice about trying that stunt on again. But you'll also marvel, gratefully, at the abilities of a handy little device that weighs no more than a couple of bricks and fits under the luggage floor of most such vehicles.

But what happens when you've dug yourself a hole in the sands of Rainbow Beach without a tree or a bigger anchor vehicle in sight?

Often when your vehicle has dug itself into soft sand or mud, it takes a jack and sufficient solid material inserted under a wheel or two to give it the grip it needs to dig its own way out.

Most people who've been in this situation know that jacking the car up in such situations is easier said than done, and often dangerous.

Part of the purpose of the Bushranger event was to let the company demo its ingenious X-Jack and X-Trax combination. A simple explanation for how the X-Jack works is that it's like putting one of those Swiss exercise balls under the car and inflating it. Only it's not a ball, it's a cylinder, maybe 45cm in diameter, made of super-tough PVC with sprigs on the bottom to help hold it in place.

The size of the connection surface is sufficient to ensure it needs only 10PSI to get the car off the ground, so the likelihood of a big bang and more trouble is near zero. It also makes the thing easy to inflate, either from the exhaust outlet using the purpose-made plastic connector, or a 12V compressor.

The X-Jack is good for up to 750mm of lift, but you only need to get a couple of inches' space beneath the affected wheel to slip the X-Trax beneath it. Made from moulded super-tough recycled tyre rubber, X-Trax look like unfurled tank tracks. Laid under the wheel, the upside gives the tyre about 1.5 metres (read: plenty) of rough, hard surface to grab while the downside grabs the ground.

Once the vehicle's out of the hole you just retrieve the tracks, wash them down if you need to, stow them in their canvas bag and you're off.

A spade or shovel is a handy thing for all of this, too, of course.

TYRE CHOICE IS IMPORTANT
There are things you can do to minimise your chances of needing any such gear. The first thing to do going into the rough is to deflate your tyres to around 20PSI, to soften and broaden them. Which means if you have ideas of taking your SUV off the road, 15- or 16-inch wheels with a bit of profile in the tyre will serve you much better than the optional 20-inch bling with the rubber-bands. But the right tyres are important for grip and sidewall durability.

What else you might need depends on the nature and duration of the trip. Bushranger's list of essentials and conveniences includes:

MAKING THE MOST OF THE CAR'S OWN GEAR
The Toyota RAV4 and the Hyundai ix35 we had on the day were equipped with downhill assistance systems capable of making life much easier for drivers on steep dirt. These leverage existing technologies, like stability control, to apply both engine and wheel braking, in place of the more flexible intermediate cog system that doubles the transmission range in heavy duty 4WDs.

Combined with a little common sense on the part of the driver, it proved quite effective in negotiating tracks and terrain that might otherwise be out of bounds, or at least experts-only.

On that front, one thing you can leave behind on any such trip is the leaden right foot.

Among our instructors on the day, perhaps the most popular word of advice for those at the wheel was 'feather', in relation to both the accelerator and the brake. As in, "just feather it mate..." Because lightness of touch is perhaps the most important factor this kind of driving.

Nothing digs holes in soft surfaces faster than a right foot trying to blast the vehicle's way out.

While feathering wasn't hard to learn, for this relative novice (and most of his peers), a wheel placement test proved the most challenging part of the day.
Here, drivers had to touch yellow-painted pointers on the course with both front and rear wheel on either side of the car. Our hosts stood ahead of the vehicles marking us on our prowess. Most of us ended up with many more crosses than ticks...

It was a gentle pointer to the sensitivity and millimetre precision required for serious off-road driving.