Late last year, I participated in a comparison test between our Isuzu light truck and a reasonably standard ute, albeit one with a rear differential lock. The idea for the comparison is to give an idea of what is available in Oz outside of utes, which in many cases people are running up to and over their GVM and maybe when they consider their next vehicle for touring they may wish to seriously consider going the light truck route. Most people in Oz think light trucks are reasonably useless for doing stuff in the bush, unless it's a Unimog or MAN, whereas the truth is that the Fuso Canter and Isuzu NPS offer a reasonable alternative at a more reasonable price after modifications like super singles, at a minimum, are done.
Our own situation is one where we ran our slide-on camper on our Isuzu D-Max cab chassis tray back ute for 10 years, before the ute started to fail. Endless corrugations, some sand hills and sometimes very sandy tracks, all added to the workload of the venerable D-Max to the point that even with some extensive modifications it no longer cut the mustard. The ute was my daily driver around town with the camper parked on our property when not touring. Plus, we were always right on the limit of our weight carrying capacity.
Having been retired for 8½ years now, circumstances have changed and a more permanent situation was on the cards. A motorhome like what are doing would be wonderful, but we had a perfectly good camper which we designed and had built 11 years ago. So we opted for a new truck through ATW in Qld with a tray and bolted the camper to it; not perfect, but it should see us out.
Some discussion about what could be useful and what should really be considered necessary, zeroed in on a couple of modifications to the standard truck. The ATB LSD was viewed as virtually mandatory if one was serious and may get into situations where one needed all the traction one could muster. In various parts of this comparison you can see the front LSD doing its bit, but at 20' is probably where the front differential is shown at its best. This is a manual gearbox unit and in all situations, except when amongst the trees, I never touched the clutch going up or down. Careful throttle application negates that need and coupled with a large very unstressed engine (5.2L) it recovers from near stalling at idle speed under heavy load easily.
On the day of this comparison, I weighed the truck immediately prior, front axle 2780kg, rear axle 2940kg total 5720kg. Our tyres are rated to 1950kg each, so the rear axle is limited by the tyres to 3900kg, while the front axle is rated to 3100kg and is limited by the axle rating, giving us our legal GVM of 7000kg.