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Fortuner’s son

SINGAPORE — Driving a Toyota Fortuner is what it must be like to be seven feet tall with muscles like Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime.

SINGAPORE — Driving a Toyota Fortuner is what it must be like to be seven feet tall with muscles like Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime.

On the one hand, it gives you an elevated sense of machismo, and makes you feel like the sort of man who could open an oyster just by staring at it. People are literally forced to look up to you.

The downside of being such a he-man is that the world feels wrongly sized for you, plus you have to eat six chickens a day to sustain yourself.

The Fortuner is a bit like that, largely owning to the fact that under the skin, it is more truck than car. The frame it sits on is shared with Toyota’s Hilux, a workhorse pickup with a reputation for mechanical immortality.

OLD-SCHOOL TOUGHNESS

The workhouse origins make it one of the last old-school SUVs (Sports Utility Vehicles) around, along with the Mercedes-Benz G-Class. These days, SUVs tend to be based on cars with some added ride height thrown in.

Yet, with this second-generation model (11 years after the original made its debut), Toyota is hoping that the Fortuner will transcend its relatively humble roots.

“The fact that Fortuner was the SUV derivative of a pickup created our sense of purpose for the development of the next generation,” said Hiroki Nakajima, the car’s chief engineer.

To move it away from the world of pickup trucks, the Fortuner has been given contemporary styling details like bright LED headlights (along with daytime running lights), 18-inch alloy wheels and a shark-fin antenna.

It has newly chiselled looks, along with a slightly lower roofline to give it a sleeker profile. That brings its overall height down from 1,850mm to 1,835mm, which lowers the risk that it will leave paint on the ceilings of carparks with low ceilings.

But it also eats into headroom, so much so that the third row of seats is best reserved for kids (or small adults), while climbing into the front seats obliges you to duck your head or risk hitting the roof.

TALL ORDER

Entering the Fortuner is tougher if you’re short, because it’s a tall car that you actually have to climb into. The young may be spry enough to make a decent go of it, but the elderly may find boarding the tall Toyota a challenge.

Once you’re inside, though, you’ll find a plusher cabin than before, with materials that yield nicely to the touch and up-to-date features like an 8-inch touchscreen entertainment system. The driver also gets an electrically powered seat.

But the emphasis has plainly been on practicality and the essentials, especially for life in South-east Asia. The car retains its seven-seat layout, for instance, and it has three rows of air-conditioning vents, with separate controls for the blower in the back.

The rearmost seats don’t fold into the floor (the truck platform doesn’t have the space for it) so they flip up out of the way instead. The operation looks fiddly, but a simple tug on a strap gets most of the job done.

The middle seats slide and recline to allow occupants to play with how much space they want to give to people in the very back.

ROUGH-EDGED CHARM

Where the Toyota really makes its pickup origins felt, however, is in the way it drives. While the all-terrain tyres are optimised for biting through soft mud, they make the steering response as crisp as a week-old potato chip. There are beefy springs that give it a hard, sometimes bouncy ride, too.

The steering itself is needlessly heavy, but perhaps all that forms a part of the car’s appeal. In lacking the manners of a car, the Fortuner does feel rugged, like something you would take on a safari adventure, except that it’s comfortable on the inside.

The view from the driver’s seat is magnificent, too, allowing you to see well over even other SUVs.

It’s very clear that the Fortuner is still for people who desire the rough-and-tough image of a truck-based SUV, in spite of Toyota’s attempts to sand down its rough edges. But everyone else should drive it before deciding if their needs wouldn’t be better served by a “softer”, car-based SUV.

As with being seven feet tall, there is bitter to go with the sweet, and it’s up to you which outweighs which.

TOYOTA FORTUNER

Engine: 2,694cc, 16V, in-line four, 163bhp, 245Nm

Performance: 175kmh, 0-100km/h 12.47 seconds, 10.7L/100km, 253g/km CO2

Price: S$191,888 with COE

On Sale: Now

+: Feels lofty and rugged, and offers seven-seat practicality

- : The handling is still old-school SUV, and vehicle entry may be hard for seniors

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