![]() Overlanding was-is-at heart about building a vehicle that will take its driver and occupants thousands of miles over nearly terrain and circumstance. That’s why you’ll see the word “expedition” everywhere in the overlanding community, from its primary English-language home online,, to every medium-sized town’s local upfitter. A friend’s family used to run an African safari tour company with self-built Land Rover-based rigs, which they built on custom frames that held a second engine block as a support member in case they needed a spare in the wilderness. Original overlanding rigs often had massive potable water supplies, spare axles and welding rigs, and food storage for weeks. The communities that kickstarted the overlanding trend were often the world travelers: people riding KLRs from Alaska to Tierra Del Fuego someone spending months living out of a truck while touring Mongolia and to a great extent, also the full-time #vanlife community before it was a hashtag. It’s about safety and comfort in environments that can be dangerous, either because of remoteness from civilization or human factors. The core differentiator of overlanding from basically all other vehicle-based tourism is that it’s self-supported. (I’m a 180-degree flip-top camper shell on a body-on-frame-pickup man myself these days, but I’ve enjoyed full-size vans and SUVs in the past. People will debate what’s better, but just like their RV cousins, there isn’t ever really a best-just what’s best for your needs, budget, and tolerance for compromise. ![]() Modern overlanding builds are done on platforms of all shapes and sizes. They have their advantages, although never purely on price, but they’re also a big signifier of the culture, for better or worse. Now there are dozens of companies selling roof-top tents in the United States, from Smitybuilt to hand-made contraptions that cost tens of thousands of dollars. In the U.S., roof-top tents were expensive-almost mythological as recently as 15 years ago. ![]() And on a big SUV, they’re high up away from the ground, where the snakes are. And depending on their complexity, they’re sometimes faster to pack up. (There was a small group of adherents in Europe, too, competing with the pop-top vans like the Westfalia conversions of VW buses and caravans.) Is a roof-top tent better than a ground tent? Sometimes! They’re almost always easier to set up. After a few decades of experimentation around the globe, the Aussies were the first to really adopt one of the hallmarks of overlanding: the roof-top tent. Go-anywhere rigs that could haul everything you’d need, with just enough room inside to curl up to sleep if it wasn’t safe outside. The ür-overlanding trucks were the original body-on-frame SUVs: the Land Rover Defender and Toyota Land Cruiser. peacekeeping Land Cruiser and neighborhood warlord Hilux gun platforms), Australian outback builds (aluminum flatbeds glinting in the desert heat on the backs of diesel Fords and Toyotas), and a variety of prosaically built Central and South American trucks that simply had to go long distances through tough terrain. That truck building includes primarily blends African Land Rover-based travel (both the classic safari stuff but with a dash of U.N. It makes me so happy.īasically, overlanding as a term and/or concept is a fusion of long-term tourism and international long-distance truck building. I’ve spent hundreds of nights of my life sleeping in vehicles over the years and still wouldn’t consider myself an adventurer, but have every intention to continue vaporizing money to fix small problems largely of my own making. ![]() But to be clear: overlanding as an enthusiast car hobby is about as perilous to one’s judgment as stance culture. The general camping scene asks-again, rightly-if it might be cheaper, easier, and just about as good to throw a ground tent in the backseat and spend most of your money on gas and time off from work. And that if the vehicle you’re planning on sleeping in at night is stuck, what then? Lots of people don’t get “overlanding.” The hardcore rock-crawling types rightly point out that a typical overlanding vehicle isn’t as capable on nasty terrain as a purpose-built rig. Without trying to get into a whole history of overlanding, let me try to draw a few circles around camping, travel, and automotive hobbies to add some context before talking about a few things that caught my eye while testing out my Porsche 911 camper at the latest Overland Expo event earlier this month in Virginia.
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