Isuzu Trooper
 

Hi All,

I'm thinking about driving my girlfriend back home to Australia in our Isuzu Trooper next year.

The Trooper doesnt get much of a mention when it comes to the subject of Overlanding, but could it make the journey as well as a Land Rover or LandCruiser?

Its a 1995 3.1TD - 60,000 miles and has led a sheltered life so far in Japan (its actually a Bighorn but we like to keep that quiet in polite company).

The Isuzu engine is thirsty, but I've heard its easy to fix and has Japanese reliability, would we be OK for parts etc.?

I've tried to research kitting out the Trooper (extra fuel tank, roof rack, etc) but it doesnt appear to be as well catered for as LR's or LC's and it feels that you have to look much harder to try and find various items.

Would it be silly to go with our Trooper, should we be looking for a LC / LR instead?

Once you get out of Europe the Isuzu brand becomes more common, they have a lot of badge engineering deals with local companies, so often you will see an Isuzu lookalike with (eg; in Australia) a Holden badge and another name - Jackaroo. I'd expect that Australia has more aftermarket items for the Troopers than most countries - have a look at ARB - they maybe able to help with special orders into the UK for things like winch bars, full length roof racks, storage systems.

Parts support is fair, but like anything Japanese thats not a current model parts tend to get rare and expensive.

The Trooper is not a hardcore offroad vehicle, its a muddy road 4x4, often called a "softroader". The front ends were/are notorious for being soft and running out of toe in adjustment if driven on "bad" (corrugated, potholed) roads.

You need to do some serious research about bringing any vehicle into Australia as its not as easy as driving across to France. There are plenty of threads on the Australia New Zealand forum about private imports/carnets etc.

Can you let me know in simple terms or point me in the right direction to find out a bit more about this, I'm not quite sure what you mean.

We used to have trouble with the Jackaroos steering continually going out of alignment, the front end would gradually spread outwards - ie tyres pointing outwards on either side. It was not a problem on all vehicles - just the ones that got driven hard on bad dirt roads - deep potholes, badly corrugated. The ones that operated on bitumen never missed a beat.

I'm not sure if the 95 model Trooper had that problem fixed.

In Europe you dont get many (any?) people driving 50,000kms a year on dirt roads - so it may have been a problem specific to some Australian rural usage.

Hi Roger, thanks for letting me know, I'm still on a steep learning curve!

I've had a look on the Trooper Forum over here (itocuk) - are there any good forums over in Oz for the Jackaroo and Overlanding in general?

Thanks again.

Try using Google and limit your searches to Australia.

I'm not aware of any specific Jackaroo forums, USENET has a aus.cars.offroad which is a general forum, but not used much.