Toyota Fortuner off-road experience – Getting the Fortuner’s boots dirty

Toyota has a lot going for it with the new Fortuner. Brand following is something that it’s amassed already and now with the new car Toyota has managed to ditch the old cars somewhat rudimentary roots as well. The new Fortuner looks more sophisticated and modern. It gets a new engine, a massively reworked chassis and a bucket load of electronic aids.

Now we have already extensively driven the new Fortuner and you can get all the extensive details here.

This short stint that we had was just to show us how capable the new car is should you decide to get it dirty. Toyota had set up an off-road track with some difficult sections to show us how the big SUV uses its new electronic aides to ease through it.

There were railings that led the Fortuner to perform some very impressive articulation and also demonstrated how the car locks the wheels which are suspended in the air and at the same time transfers the power to the wheels that have maximum traction available. This was followed by some deep chicken holes that we put the car through to see how much more sorted the new suspension set-up is. 

Up next was steep downhill which showed us how effective the DAS or downhill assist feature is. So once you press the DAS button on the dash, slot the gear into Drive and get off the brakes. The DAS does all the braking for you no matter how steep the downhill incline angle is. Slotting it into tiptronic and leaving it in first gear will make it crawl down even slower. All one has to do is steer. Pretty impressive stuff if you’re coming down a slippery slope. There was positive and negative side inclines which we put the new Fortuner through where you think you’re almost going to tip over sideways but the car just breezes through. 

We managed to go flat out in some serious slush where the Fortuner refused to demonstrate any kind of drama and just went throughout it without any stress. Post the slush was an incredible uphill climb to test the Fortuner’s approach angle, crawling ability and the Hill assist feature. We managed to approach the incline without scraping anything so that’s one box checked.

Once we hit the incline I went on the brakes and released the pedal and voila, no roll back. The hill assist makes sure you don’t roll back into the car at the back and this is a good feature to have for amateur drivers. As for the crawling, well I did manage to get the Fortuner’s wheels spinning and make it struggle to crawl out of the incline. But considering the Fortuner was on road based tyres and this was an extreme climb, I wouldn’t cut any marks.

For the final stint we went about water wading. With a depth of 700mm, once inside the Fortuner’s 18-inch wheels were completely submerged and one could hear the exhaust burbling under water. So Mumbai monsoons should be a piece of cake but of course if you do plan to go boating in it, a snorkel will always be a wise investment.

While we know that almost 90 per cent of the new Fortuner owners will not even remotely try something like this in their cars, the idea of this boot camp was to show that the Fortuner is not merely for city commutes or highway munching but also has the capabilities to do a lot more. And that is something we totally agree with!