Anyone rock crawl a 3rd gen?

If you want to crawl, jeep has no equal. Sure you can take a taco to a lot of places that a jeep can go, but it wont be as easy and with much higher likelyhood of incurring damage.

Good luck.

 

This thread has me considering a Jeep

But the wife will probably kill me if I get another new vehicle.. hmm decisions decisions

 

Why not both?

That'll most likely be my route in the future. Jeep for the real rough wheeling, and the truck for when I do my 100miles + off-road adventures into the woods

 

If you dont “really want” or “must have” a bed, jeep is definitely the tip of the spear for rock crawling.

 

Well it is true, I’m not in dire need of a bed. But I also considered an old LJ, and making it strictly a crawler. I guess if I flip it or crash it, it won’t hurt as much as the taco.

As for the taco I considered a Chevy63 swap to help with articulation.

 

For now the taco delivers the Jeep to the trails. But hopefully some day it will get to go play too.

 

Wish I could, but pretty sure my wife would castrate me if I damaged the truck . I have done some trails and was impressed with a stock Taco, but would not call it "rock crawling."

 

You're kidding, right?

 

That's the route we've taken. Our '11 Rubicon (which is no longer a Rubicon) is streetable, but is best being towed to trails. It's also not capable of carrying all our gear and our three dogs on trails, so we've modded my wife's '17 for easy to low-end-hard trails. It did really well in CO back in August. It can also be driven to the trails and back.

The reason ANY Tacoma, no matter the amount of mods, will suffer vs a Wrangler, IMO, is that they're physically larger. I have no qualms about USING our truck, but that doesn't mean I want to trash the body. I feel the same way about our Wrangler, but even though the JK is larger than previous Wranglers, it's still smaller than a Tacoma (yet ours still has at least minor damage on every single body panel).

I despise the Jeep vs Tacoma mentality. Both have their utility, both are capable 4x4s in their own way, but shouldn't be directly compared, IMO.

I wouldn't have dared take the truck through a spot like this:



And, frankly, we couldn't have driven to CO with our dogs and all our gear and run trails like this, in the Jeep:

 

Jeep

 

Why would I be kidding? Once a Tacoma has better articulation in the suspension then it's on par with jeeps. The tacoma it a solid off roader. The only other part the makes the taco lag behind a little is the departure angle and again with a little cutting that can be fixed.

Maybe you nay sayers should do a little research and look at some of the 4runner and Tacoma builds on pirate4x4. You don't have to spend 50k to make it a rock crawling platform.

 

Dude, I've been 'wheeling for twenty+ years, so don't act like you're talking to the uninitiated. Unless you're WAY more than a talented shade tree mechanic, you're going to spend A LOT more than $15K to make a newer Taco as capable as an off-the-showroom-floor Rubicon with some bolt ons. And, unless you start doing some serious bobbing and narrowing, you're going to absolutely trash the Taco's body when you try following the Jeeps through the narrow spots.

So your argument, in this context, is baseless. Unless the average person has more money than sense, a 3rd Gen Taco is probably not going to be the platform they start with to build a serious crawler.

I'm not basing this on a Jeep superiority complex, at all, just on lots and lots of experience modding and 'wheeling a variety of vehicles.

 

Ahhh, but the Toyota reliability will always get you home... Tacoma ftw!

 

I think the point they are making is that you don't have to mod a Jeep to be "on par" or "keep up".
Stock vs. stock the Jeep would win most off-road contests and if mods were applied equally then the Jeep would still be the better off-roader.

 

The best built Jeep will always out wheel the best built tacoma

 

So
Much
Fail...

 

If you have enough steel, and good spotters, you can take one of these trucks through some rough trails. A couple weekends ago I was in Moab and did Hell's Gate and the Golden Crack. The longer wheel base on a taco helps with obstacles like that. Admittedly, a Jeep with as much money in mods as I have would easily out crawl me. But they wouldn't want to do those obstacles with a RTT and weeks worth of camping gear. Tacos are much more capable than many people think. Here are a couple pics from those obstacles:

 

Back up your statement. Making a point without anything to back it up means nothing. Why is this a failure? What can a Jeep do that a Tacoma can't (with appropriate setup) and why?

 

Of course, stock jeeps will run laps around a stock Tacoma. My point is that a well modified Tacoma will do most of the same stuff a Jeep can do. Now, because the longer wheel base it is more stable in some cases and can do things the jeep can't. The Jeep is narrower as pointed out above and shorter wheel base so it can also do some (not much) that a Tacoma can't do. For 99% of the rock crawling, a built Tacoma will do anything a Jeep can do.

 

Both. This is my other project. Still has a lot of work to go.