MOTORING Ravishingly good
Toyota’s RAV4 has come a long way since its debut in 1994 WORDS NEIL LYNDON
A
20-year-old Toyota RAV4 came out of a turning in front of me when I was driving the latest version through our
village. Squashed up at each end and high- roofed, with tiny wheels like a little Tonka toy, it looked almost as quaintly antiquated as one of those inverted dustbin Daleks from Doctor Who when Patrick Troughton was a Time Lord. If you put the new, large and luxurious RAV4
beside that 1994 original, you’d see change on a scale to match the difference between the humble, austere 1959 Mini and today’s Mini, a spoiled rich kid’s favourite city runaround. Like the Mini, the fi rst RAV4 was a revolu-
tionary innovation that opened everybody’s eyes to a whole new category of car. With the world now teeming with sports utility vehicles (SUVs), it’s hard to remember there was a time when no such thing existed. If you needed a car that could be driven off-road, you might buy a Land Rover or a Subaru. If you wanted a fash- ionable little car in which to run around town, you probably bought a Renault Clio. Some people might keep both cars at the same time; but nobody thought of combining their charac- teristics into a single, misshapen little box. And then, in 1994, along came the RAV4 –
an acronym for recreational active vehicle with four-wheel drive. And, with one voice, half of the whole world exclaimed: ‘Ah yes: that’s what I’ve been waiting for all along.’ The other half of the population was bemused. Why were people getting so worked
‘This is one soft-roader that might give a robust account of itself if called upon to act as a stand-in for the Land Rover on the farm’
Below: Designed to be as comfortable on the road as off it, the new RAV4 has been fully upgraded.
up about a vehicle that looked like a packing case perched on a roller skate, was unpleasant to drive on the road because its body was so tall and had such limited off-road capability that it was likely to get seriously stuck on a muddy playing fi eld, let alone the Great Glen? Over the decades – during which more than
4.5 million RAV4s have been sold worldwide – all these puzzlements have been answered and assuaged. The best of these ‘soft-roader’ SUVs – including Nissan’s Qashqai, Skoda’s Yeti, Honda’s CR-V and Ford’s Kuga – are now advanced and refi ned road cars at the same time as they have become quite good off-road. All of that is true, with knobs on, of the
latest Toyota RAV4. Closer in overall character to the original BMW X5 than it is to its own tinpot antecedent, this RAV4 is a large and imposing vehicle with serious off-road compe- tence. Permanent all-wheel drive is an option, along with advanced electronic features such as downhill assist control. With a towing capacity of 1,500lbs, this is one soft-roader that might give a reasonably robust account of itself if it were called upon to act as a stand-in for the Land Rover on the farm. On the car I borrowed, Toyota’s venerable 150 bhp 2.2 D4D engine was clonking as rusti- cally as an old Fordson; and, with acceleration from 0-62mph in ten seconds and top speed of 115mph, it wasn’t much more sprightly than some new tractors, either. But ride and handling of this new RAV4 have been improved so much that it’s almost as good as a proper car to drive on the road; and its greatly enlarged interior and load space make it genuinely attractive as a family’s fi rst car. I was not sure that the new rear-light assemblies – which look like cereal boxes that have been jammed in sideways – are much of an improvement; but there’s no such quibble about
gate, which opens upwards At £31,000, my
the revised rear like a
hatch, rather than sideways on a hinge, like a door.
lavishly
equipped RAV4 would cost almost as much as a teacher’s salary for a year. But then the original RAV4 cost about the same as a waiter might pick up in tips in a year.
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