Jeremy Clarkson: Isuzu D-Max Arctic Trucks AT35 review

This modified Isuzu D-Max is a pick-up truck on steroids, with a tent on the roof and kitchen in the back. Who needs something like this? Perhaps only you Australians.

The Isuzu D-Max Arctic Trucks AT35.

If you’re umming and ahhing about the wisdom of buying a pick-up truck, you need to ask yourself a question. What is in the boot of your car right now? I’m guessing not much. A jumper perhaps, and maybe an old newspaper covered in weird stains. So there’s your answer. You don’t need a pick-up truck.

Things are different of course in the rural, red bits of America, where people routinely drive around with six bags of mulch, a leaf blower, a snowmobile, a chainsaw, three or four attack dogs, a crate of beer, six deckchairs and a semi-automatic rifle. That’s why they need a pick-up truck. And it’s the same story in South Africa, only with a different accent and more rifles. And Australia.

Things are different in England. You’re never more than seven miles from a shop where you can grind your own potpourri, and all your friends live in houses that are next to a road, not at the far end of an 18-hour cross-country drive over ground festooned with snakes and spiders so big you can tell whether they’re sad. This is why the pick-up truck was never really a thing in the UK. That and the fact that we are European, so we are, what’s the word? Civilised. We don’t want to be bounced around in what PJ O’Rourke described as a beer-guided back porch. We ­prefer Volkswagen Golfs.

A few years ago, though, there was a push by vehicle manufacturers including Nissan, Volkswagen and Mercedes to make pick-up trucks appeal to ordinary folk, as they do in America. So we started to see trucks with four seats, leather upholstery, sat-nav, air-con and heated seats. But that didn’t work because it turned out that normal people in the UK don’t need a car that’s impossible to park and bouncy as hell when all they need to carry around is a jumper and a stained newspaper. So now these offerings are all gone.

Ford is soldiering on with its Ranger, and making it appealing with clever financing. But Isuzu has gone down another route and ended up with the D-Max you see here. It started out in life as a barely profitable farmer special, but then along came an Icelandic outfit, Arctic Trucks, whose work I know well. They prepared the Toyota Hilux that took James May and me to the North Pole. They know that what people want is a Tonka-toy look, and what that means is big wheels. Really big. And that’s what this D-Max has. The “35” in its name is the size, in inches for God’s sake, of its tyres.

The Clarkson review: Isuzu D-Max — the pick-up with a kitchen in the boot.

To get them to fit, the chassis had to be lifted and altered, so now you can pretty much drive over St Paul’s Cathedral and not hit the cross. And the standard suspension was replaced with a Bilstein set-up. Not that it has much to do, because those enormous tyres ­absorb everything. You could run over a brick in this car and simply not know it.

Next up, an Australian 4WD accessory company called ARB – this must be the most international car ever – was called upon to fit a fully equipped kitchen unit that slides out of the load bed. And on the roof is a tent. (This, and the kitchen, are optional extras.)

So that’s excellent. Isuzu flogs a few of these high-profit-margin Tonka toys with a house on the roof – along with Apple CarPlay, sat-nav, air-con and the ability to carry more than a tonne in the back while towing 3.5 tonnes behind – and that enables it to keep on importing poverty-spec models for farmers and forestry peeps.

Just two problems. The 35 is fitted with a beep for everything. It beeps when you reach a new speed limit. It beeps when you’re going backwards. It beeps when you are breathing in and it beeps when you are breathing out. This drove me mad after only a few minutes

But what drove me even more mad was the 1.9-litre engine. You read that right. This leviathan has fewer cubes than a Golf. And rattly, diesely, gutless cubes at that. Plus, first gear is so short that you need to shift to second about a metre after you start moving. I’m told the automatic version is better but that’s so slow, 0-100km/h is barely possible.

There is some comfort. Toyota can sell you an Arctic Trucks-modified Hilux that has an actual engine with actual power.

So there we are, a whole piece on pick-up trucks without once mentioning how they are now nothing more than machinegun-mounting points with wheels. I must be getting old.

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Isuzu D-Max Arctic Trucks AT35

ENGINE: 1.9-litre, four-cylinder diesel

PERFORMANCE: 0-100km/h in 12.7 seconds

PRICE: from 57,530 pounds

RATING: 3 out of 5 stars