Rise of the Backwoods

Episode: 0275
Why are there so many dedicated 4x4's today?

​What's driving the revival of off-road utility vehicles, and why are they capturing the imagination of a new generation? Our latest episode explores this trend, questioning the necessity of the myriad off-road options swamping the market beyond stalwarts like the Jeep Wrangler and Ford Bronco. We trace the 

​evolution of the SUV landscape, from the robust early models to the rise of CUVs in the 2000s, and spotlight regions like China where rugged vehicles remain essential. Join us as we inspire you to embrace the thrill of adventure and the endless possibilities it offers.

         We've all had one of those amazingly wild adventures. We've gotten into our friend's Jeep and gone out in the backwoods, crawling over boulders, traversing hillsides and taking that trail that we thought was just for a quad to get one of the most perfect spots to see the valley from backwoods. In the backwoods drives there's something that a lot of people are really starting to look at. It's existed in the automobile industry ever since automobiles came out. The original Ford Model T's went everywhere. Hell, there were no roads when they first came out and when they traversed this country from coast to coast. But today our love affair has been rekindled with backwoods products. But how long can it go on for? And really do we need that many off-road vehicles in this marketplace? Or are we good just having like the Jeep Wrangler and the Ford Bronco? Well, today tons more car companies are expressing their interest to get into the utility marketplace. Everybody wants to compete on Jeep's home turf and, just like back in the 1960s and into the 70s, the utility market is heating up once again. Back in the 1960s and into the 70s, the utility market is heating up once again. So today AutoLooks is going to be taking a look at the rise of the backwoods utility vehicle.
 
        Welcome back to the AutoLooks Podcast. I am your host, as always, the doctor to the automotive industry, Mr. Everett Jay, coming to you from our host website at AutoLooks.net. If you haven't been there, stop by, check it out. Read some of the reviews, check out some of the ratings. Go to the Corporate Links website page. Big or small, we have them all Car companies from around the globe, all available on one centralized location and that is the AutoLooks.net website, the Corporate Links tab at the top of the page, right on your far right as you either get onto it on a desktop or on your phone. Just the drop-down menu of the last little link corporate links. Find all your car companies and stop by the help pages. Get some help, find some information about the automobile industry or products that relate to the automotive industry. We got pages there that can help you find close lakes if you live in the United States, museums close to you and hell, hell even some cool ones where you can build your own custom cars from the likes of 3d tuning, all available on the AutoLooks.net website. The AutoLooks podcast is brought to you by Ecomm Entertainment Group and distributed by Podbean.com. If you'd like to get in touch with us, send us an email over at [email protected].
 
        So, like I said in the beginning, off-road utility vehicles and why so many people are getting into buying these like. Think about it in the turn of the last century, nearly 2000s, and by the teen years, Toyota got rid of the land cruiser because there was so much overlap between the land cruiser and the forerunner and the market just wasn't big enough for it. Nissan had the Xterra because of the boom in the SUV. But with the rise of the CUV marketplace in the teen years, SUVs, dedicated SUVs, four-wheel drive, body-on-frame off-road vehicles were starting to dwindle and kind of like what happened in the end of the 1980s when people were starting to get out of that marketplace and move back into minivans. The CUV was taking over for the utility vehicle. 

​         But why was one country so involved in creating more of them and growing this market? Beijing Automotive, or BAIC, created their BJ40 to go up against the Jeep Wrangler and it became such a hit. This is coming from the car company from China that was building all of the military off-road vehicles, essentially the Chinese Jeep. So why were they keeping this market together? It's China. There are a billion people in a country that's like half the size of Canada. Why do you need off-road vehicles? Well, there's a massive desert in the northeast side. There are mountains everywhere, and where there are not mountains, it's farm fields. There are tons of people and the infrastructure can't keep up with the growth of this country and people are getting sick and tired of it buying these standard vehicles. It's the exact same concept that Mobius Motors had in Kenya to build their first vehicle watching cab drivers drive Toyota Corollas on beat up, dirt roads through back areas getting torn apart because of their cars.
 
         Vehicles today, the automobile or car today, is nothing like the original Ford Model T that we talked about in the intro to this. The Model T went everywhere. It was made to traverse a country that did not have roads. It could cross your farm field, it could wade a river slightly, it could climb rocks. The wheels were set so far forward that you could literally climb, just like you can do with a Wrangler or Bronco or Land Rover Defender. Yeah, they're all big four-wheel drive vehicles, but the luxury marketplace is one of the only ones that has managed to hold on to the utility craze. The Land Cruiser left North America, but the LX470 stuck around because high end clientele still wanted those big, burly SUVs. They didn't care that there were gas guzzlers. Well, hybrid power started giving us a little bit better gas mileage. The introduction of turbocharged four cylinders added it once again.
 
         But, like we said, the Chinese marketplace was holding on to these and even before the massive influx of electric vehicles in the past five years, China was spearheading a brand-new movement for off-road vehicles and they saw this because the Chinese car companies knew that. They sold into third world nations. They sold into African nations, they into third world nations. They sold it to African nations. They sold it to Asian nations; they sold it to the Middle Eastern nations. They sold it to areas where they needed dedicated off-road vehicles and he needed a way to get there.
 
       I remember watching the show about world's worst drivers, and they're talking about some of the worst cities in the world for traffic congestion and bad drivers. And I remember watching one and they're talking about the capital city of Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar. Don't quote me on that, I'm just trying to read this. So, the capital city of Mongolia at that point in time this is like talking in the early 2000s had less than a thousand kilometers of paved road for a city of over a million people. My home city is 3,600 square kilometers and we have over 2,000 kilometers of road for a city of 180,000 people. And this is a city of a million people with less than a thousand kilometers of paved roads.
 
       Do you want to drive something like a Toyota Corolla around a city like that, or would you be a little more comfortable driving something like a RAV4? Well, that's cool, but when you get to the outskirts of town, the roads get even worse and the potholes get even bigger, so your RAV4 is going to get damaged. So, you really want to drive something like a Land Cruiser, or a Land Cruiser Prado or hell, even the Land Cruiser FJs. You want to drive something that goes all in in the off-road community, and that is where people started realizing that there's a market for this. Now, the Chinese were into all these little countries and they already knew this, but one other country already knew this for a long time, because they helped develop this market. 

      If you go back and listen to our podcast, Jeep World, which talks about how Jeep influenced so many different car companies and products out there and essentially created most of the competition that they have in the world, jeep knows this, just like the Chinese manufacturers. They understand that there's a massive market in select nations for fully dedicated off-road vehicles. Like we said, the Mobius Motors 1 was built for that select purpose. It was built to be like the original Model T a cheap, efficient vehicle to traverse most main areas that people would travel. That was the concept it was built off of. Now the Mobius Motors 2 is a little bit more different, a little more refined, a little more comfortable, but it still has the same ideology of full-time off-road dedication. It wants to be part of the utility world, and backwoods are what you need to have.
 
       So, the Chinese started developing all of these cars for these specific markets. And as these countries and their marketplaces started growing and the Chinese started looking for new markets to sell their vehicles in, they started creating new car companies built solely off of off-road vehicles. In the early days, great Wall Motors essentially released Haval to be their new crossover utility division, but Haval was originally developed for four-wheel drive vehicles for Great Wall Motors. Now Great Wall Motors is already big into trucks and SUVs, but they wanted something more of a premium scale. Today Haval ranges from standardized products to premium products, just touching the edge of luxury with some of their vehicles and they're starting to dedicate more vehicles, like the Raptor, for full-time off-road. But then you get companies like the Jetour Sanhai, the Deepal G31, Force Gurkha, Mahindra Thar Rocks, the new Jeep Recon, the Haval Zhailong, the Haval Big Dog and even, from North America, the Alfa Rex. These are all vehicles vying for this brand-new market of off-road vehicles. And, like I said, BAIC has been building vehicles for the Chinese military for decades and their BJ-40 and BJ-80 are slowly becoming their bread-and-butter vehicles. BAIC was, a long time ago, used to have cars. Now the car division has moved to Beijing where BAIC is staying more with the off-road vehicles Like Haval staying with the off-road vehicles like Haval staying with the off-road vehicles, with Feng Chang Wang going with off-road vehicles and even I.Car. They're developing all of these amazing off-road products for a market that's demanding inclusion.
 
       Now in North America you may say, well, we've always had big off-road vehicles. We're the ones that developed it with the original Jeep or the Model T. Well, essentially all vehicles, when they first started coming out, had to go everywhere, so they were all essentially four-wheel drives. But in North America the utility market started to retract upon itself in the teen years. It is slightly growing at the end of the 60s and by the late 70s we started to see even more growth in it. All the way up until the early 90s, the Ford Explorer was essentially the vehicle that changed the utility marketplace into more civilian use, and with it came one of the first crossover utility vehicles. You have to remember the Explorer. Even though it looked like an SUV when it first came out, it was a crossover utility vehicle where the Bronco was a true 4x4. But the Explorer eventually kicked the Bronco out of the price range and out of the product lineup to take over. That one lasts forever. Because eventually Ford would bring the Expedition and even bigger Excursion into play.
 
      Because people who want full-size utility vehicles want SUVs, body-on-frames, because they want something that long to be fully secure. You can't have a CUV that big. You're going to bend your frame Now you can do it. But more people are willing to just say screw it, we don't really care if it's body-on-frame, gas mileage does not bother and that's why luxury makes. Like we said, the LX470 stuck around in the North American marketplace when the Land Cruiser took off. Now the Land Cruiser is back, but the Land Cruiser is coming back to the Toyota truck brand. Now Toyota has always had the 4Runner kicking around as their dedicated body-on-frame SUV. 

       The Land Cruiser was a step up and for a short-lived time we had the FJ Cruiser. Well, the 4Runner used to come in both 2-door and 4-door models. Well, now they don't have a 2-door model. That's where the FJ in the 2000s started picking up, because the 4Runner didn't have that to compete with Jeep. But its today's design didn't last forever and a lot of people were kind of put off by it. So, they weren't going after that vehicle and they didn't want to get into it. So, they would just get a 4Runner. And the 4Runner was priced more for the standard market. So, the Land Cruiser was too far up. It was more of a premium or luxury model. But when you start getting into that might as well just go to the Lexus. The market wasn't big enough to hold all of them in it. Same reason why the Wagoneer disappeared in the 90s Because it wasn't big enough to support both the Wagoneer and the Grand Cherokee in the marketplace Today.
 
      Look what Jeep has. You get your Avenger; you get your Renegade. You get your Compass. You get the new Recon that's coming out. You get your YJ. You get your Cherokee. You get your Grand Cherokee, your Grand Cherokee L, which is extended edition, and then now you're getting your Wagoneer and Wagoneer S and now Grand Wagoneer, full product range of utility vehicles.
 
       Land Rover is getting that between both Land Rover and Range Rover platforms and now they're branching out to create the Discovery nameplate. They think they can make a go of it, can they? Well, they might be able to, but nowadays companies like Mercedes, who has had the G-Class that was dedicated for the military and is now the top tier of luxury rings with its own Maybach edition. You have to remember, the only SUV from a premier or high-end brand is the Rolls-Royce Cullinan, because the Bentley Bentayga is an Audi Q8 and Lamborghini Urus platform. So, it's a crossover utility vehicle where the Cullinan is a body-on-frame full-scale SUV. Now it's not going to go riding through dirt like everything else, but there's a market demand for it. Aurus, a new company from Russia, created by Putin for the Russian people, for the high up dignitaries, has a coming out. Honky is getting into the luxury and premier utility make. 

​       World market was growing only because of fuel consumption and hybrids were just too heavy and cumbersome for just about any type of vehicle and priced you way out of buying a standardized product as a hybrid SUV. Today people are looking at that and the market is expanded, but gas mileage is starting to wane because between CUVs and SUVs, fuel consumption is getting even closer, even for internal combustion engines. And now, with the increase in plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, hybrid electric vehicles or even electric vehicles, these markets could sustain even more products. But why? Why is this market growing? It's not only because Chinese companies are going into third world nations where a demand for dedicated off-road vehicles exists, because they want to save money on destroying sedans, but it's also because of a growing trend to adventure outside of your bubble.
 
       Yes, for the longest time, suburbanites were bubble people. My in-laws are a perfect example of that. They don't travel anywhere outside of their bubble. Their bubble stretches from Niagara Falls to St Jacobs and the southwest. It's more like a pyramid. They go out towards Milton and nowhere north of Brampton or Oakville. Hell, Mississauga and Toronto are too far out for them. They had this weird little bubble. Now a brand-new generation, generation Z, wants to get out and see the world.
 
       The evolution of social media TikTok has allowed us to see everything around us in a short span of time. We don't have to sit here and watch a 20-minute YouTube video of some guy's trip on Highway 17 from Sault Ste Marie all the way to Thunder Bay. No, we don't have to sit and watch that. We can literally watch a 30-second clip of the entire trip as well, see all the high points and want to get there. But when we do a little bit of research because a lot more people these days like to go on Google, do their backstory searches on products and places to find out where they're going and what they're going to experience they're going to find all these Reddit feeds about people telling them that you need a full-time off-road vehicle.
 
      I went to Superior National Park with my RAV4, and, trust me, there's an area in it where, if my Borrego wasn't the unicorn that it was, I would have preferred to take that bad boy down, because it was a backwoods road with essentially a dirt, slash gravel road that gets washed out in the springtime in many areas where you have to slow down for the big boulders and speed up. On the other areas where I've had full-time off-road vehicle, I could literally just gun through it about 70 kilometers an hour, no problem. You can cross all these big rocks and climb up on these mountains. People are seeing these and social media is showing it to them, and people want to go see these places. They realize that their parents lived in this stupid little bubble confined to one little area, and if they ever went to another country they would get on a plane and fly there and then only see another section of that. 

​        Well, this is brand new generation of kids. Xennials are kind of at the edge of it. Same with millennials, it's more of Generation Z and Generation Alpha that are starting to look outside of the bubble that their parents lived in. They want to explore the world and see what's outside of where they live. They don't want to drive 20 minutes to see something that they could literally almost see at home. They want to drive hours to see something cool. They want to explore the world and show people that they've seen the top of the Canadian Rockies.
 
       They've driven the top automotive drives and the only way you can get to a lot of these places are these dedicated off-road vehicles the Bronco, the Wrangler, the Jimny, the Land Cruiser and some past favorites by people finding out about all kinds of different past favorites to get out of their suburban life and have more freedom to go wherever they want. They're realizing that in North America especially, we don't have tons of vehicles like this and even in European countries they don't have tons of products like this because we've been subjectify to fuel mileage for so long that these products could completely disappear from the marketplace. Products like the Xterra, the Bronco, up until recently, the Jimmy the Blazer They've been gone. The Land Cruiser is back and the Land Cruiser is back with two iterations. Now they have a brand-new Land Cruiser FJ for Asian marketplaces, built off the Hilux Champ platform. We're not getting in North America and really, I wish they would build it at least in Canada to allow us to have it, because we got a lot of backwoods areas Be a great little thing to have. They're bringing these vehicles out because people want to explore the world around them.
 
        Street racing has been given such a bad rap in the past 20 years that nobody wants to do it anymore. There's so much risk involved with street racing because of all these street takeovers and police. You know brand new laws, like in my home province, the 50 over law, where they literally take your car for up to 72 hours and charge you $1,500 fine. It's not like where it once was when our parents were younger. The only place for us to go out and have fun anymore is away from people in the backwoods. It's the only real way to escape suburban life and, with a clamp down on street racing and aftermarket tuning, the off-road arena is one of the only places, one of the only salvations still kicking around for all of us to go out and explore freely. You have to think about how many backwoods roads, logging roads, hill climbs have existed for over a century and now a lot of us are starting to realize it. But the funniest thing is this might not be just an increase in the backwoods tribes. This is also an increase in adventure, in travel exploration.
 
        There are more people with Wanderlust in Generation Z and Generation Alpha than there was in the previous two generations. The last generation that had Wanderlust was in the previous two generations. The last generation that had Wanderlust were the baby boomers, a lot of them. That was their only way to see anything. They didn't have televisions and if they did, they only had one. They didn't have the internet. They could only see pictures by book or by getting in their car and going there. You couldn't go and explore Disney World on Google Maps. You had to physically go there to enjoy it, so they had to go out and see the world. They had wanderlust. But as the world became more suburban, we all lost that, and even suburban and urban dwellers are realizing that 4x4s and the backwoods drives are what they want to do. They don't necessarily want to live there, they just want to go and have fun there, and I've seen this happen. 

        I live in an area that's predominantly these great, amazing back roads. Trust me, send me an email and I could tell you about all kinds of amazing back roads adventures within an hour's drive of my centralized city, where you need dedicated off-road vehicles. You could do it with the standard all-wheel drive CUV as well and you can attempt to do it with your car, but it's better with a four-wheel drive for rock climbing. I did one of them with my old Borrego this past summer going out to camp. I had a lot more fun driving my truck for four-wheel drive and dedicated slow crawl. It makes it more fun. It makes the world bigger and more of an adventure.
 
     Social media has recapped our wanderlust. Social media has recapped our wanderlust and has showed to us all these amazing places and made us say, hey, I want to go there, but for a lot of us we can't afford to go there because we're limited on what products are available to us and the price points. So, products like the old Dodge Ram chargers, the old GMC Jimmys or even the Nissan Xterra’s from past, we can pick them up dirt cheap and try and keep them around, and that has now created new demand for these vehicles to either come back or a new one to be created. Nissan is now looking at bringing back the Xterra, GMC wants to bring back the Jimmy. Dodge has even considered a Ram Charger to sit above the next Durango or even move the Durango onto a body-on-frame architecture to be shared with the next Dakota. Because they know that people want adventure vehicles, they want to see the world around them.
 
      And even though in the past decade we had the rise of the Crosstrex it's a good podcast from our first season. Go back and listen to it, it's really good the Crosstrex, or trekking marketplace, has boomed in the past decade. Before that you barely ever saw it besides Subaru's, the occasional Mitsubishis or even the Eagle brand. But off-road variations of vehicles are starting to grow, even in the aftermarket industry Off-road variations of vans, sports cars, coupes, wagons and sedans Either get Trekking editions or even full-scale four-wheel drive. If you saw Fast and the Furious 7, you saw a four-wheel drive variation of both a Camaro and a Charger the game. The Crew showed that market to us and people are starting to do them with Nissan Z's.
 
       This is a growing marketplace. People want to explore the backwoods and more companies are looking at getting into these marketplaces. This is how Honda, the most suburbanized car company in the world, now has trail sport editions of the Passport, the Pilot, the CR-V of all things and the Ridgeline. They want to create further into the word trekking variations of their crossover utility vehicles, and even the brand-new Passport's design is teetering on the edge of utility. It's not utility because it's still unibody, not body on frame, but they want to give you the illusion of off-roading. The nice, clean, sleek nines of the crossover utility vehicle craze that started with the Nissan Murano in the early 2000s is slowly starting to become a secondary fact to the big boxy brutes to go off-road. Now, companies like Hyundai, Kia, Audi, BMW, Nissan has already had them before but wants to get back into it. GMC, who you actually think is a truck company, doesn't even have a dedicated SUV, except for the Yukon, which is full-size, extended, it doesn't have a compact or mid-size off-road vehicle, and that's what people want. People want these, and Alpha Motors in North America is one of the only car companies that's looking to give us these with their tiny little Rex off-road vehicles built on the same platform as their Alpha sedans. The off-road market is growing and the rise to the backwoods is growing as well.
 
       We're being captivated by social media to go out and see the world around us. For once, social media may have made it so we could sit on a couch and doom scroll for two hours every single night, instead of actually getting up off our asses, creating a website, making podcasts, rating cards, you know, doing stuff that I do, or whatever else you like. When we finally realize that we need to stop doom scrolling, we open our door and we go for a walk to see something that's even closer to us. We realize that we can go and see some of these things with our own vehicles. Let's ditch the Corolla and get a Land Cruiser FJ. Let's go explore the backwoods together. Together we can have more fun doing it. 

​        So, like I said, in my home area I got tons and tons of trails and back roads and forestry roads, the old logging roads, mining access roads all over the place that I can go and have fun at any point in time. And there's one big national park not too far away from me, a few hours, that has just exploded with people seeking adventure in life. That's Algonquin Provincial Park in the province of Ontario, just north of Toronto. They like to say it's in northern Ontario, but I tell them to fuck off. Algonquin Provincial Park in the province of Ontario, just north of Toronto, they like to say it's in northern Ontario, but I tell them to fuck off. Algonquin Provincial Park is not northern Ontario, trust me. Mississauga Provincial Park just north of the LA Lake Now that's a provincial park. You park, you walk in, that's it. You're in the middle of nowhere, Algonquin. You can still find people and if you get lost you can still get cell service in quite a few of the areas. But they're seeing an explosion.
 
        The town of Huntsville is exploding with all of these adventure-type people, and seeing a Jeep Wrangler, seeing a Ford Bronco, seeing a Land Rover Defender in town is not an unusual sight in a place like Huntsville. Seeing an SUV is like me seeing a full-size pickup truck. It's just the norm size pickup truck. It's just the norm, with countries like China pushing these utility vehicles into more nations and creating smaller variations of them so they can build upon more nations around the globe and get them on wheels and get them to explore the countryside. We can see that there's a great, big world just outside our door. All we need is the right vehicle to go and see so in all reality. Why is this market exploding? Why is there a rise in the backwoods roads or backwoods vehicles, entry-level products for third-world nations that don't have good roads?
 
          An explosion in wanderlust in people. Once again, we all want to see the world and not everyone wants to sit behind a screen and see it shown to us. Some of us want to get up off our asses and explore it and have an adventure. Throw a tent up in the middle of the bush, fight a bear or run away from it, catch your fish and cook it yourself. We want to do that and these vehicles are going to get us there. It's the reason why I keep buying four-wheel drive vehicles, for at least one of my vehicles in my household. It's because I want to see all those areas that I used to love going to when I was little, when my uncle or my grandparents or even my dad had a truck and was able to get there. I want to see them and I want to show them to my kids. I want to show them that the world is so much bigger than what's just off the highway, and for that I need a 4x4. 

       So, if you like this podcast, please like, share or comment about any of the major social feeds or streaming sites that you've found the AutoLooks Podcast on. Like us, share us, comment about us. You know, tell your friends, tell your family, tell your well-wishers, send us a comment. Click the like button at the bottom so you can find out more information about other episodes that we have done, some of our past episodes. Stop by the website. AutoLooks.net has every single episode we've ever done, inclusive of a couple that I actually have never even gone on to any of the major streaming sites, all available right there at the AutoLooks.net website. And while there, stop by. Read some of the reviews. Check out some of the ratings. Go to the Corporate Links website page. Big or small, we have them all car companies from around the globe, all available in one select location the Corporate Links website there at the far right, right next to the help, and after that, click the like button.
 
         Follow us and share us. Get us out to the world and tell everybody else what great adventures they can have. Like we just talked about one of our past podcasts, the automotive escape why we become more of an adventure society kind of goes along with this one, but this one focuses on why so many of these vehicles exist. The Unlocked Podcast is brought to you by Ecomm Entertainment Group and distributed by Podbean.com. If you'd like to get in touch with us, send us an email over at [email protected]. So, for myself and Everett Jay, the Ecomm Entertainment Group, the AutoLooks.net website and Podbean.com, thank you for listening, thank you for following us and just plain thank you for giving us a chance. And, for myself, strap yourself in for this one fun, wild ride that the off-road world is going to take us on. 

Everett J.
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