this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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I can't speak for others, but I definitely do use mine for off-roading as much as I can.
Is it as much as I'd like? No - I have to earn the money to afford the hobby. But it's absolutely worth it, especially when I get to show my daughter some of the awesome things we have to offer.
The reality is that we're a rough, tough country, and getting to see lots of it requires special vehicles.
The reason this seems so recent is because, previously, 4WD vehicles were either purpose-built, or expensive if they were tricked out to be daily drivers. That made them uncomfortable or expensive.
With the death of our local car market, it's opened up a much wider, cheaper, more refined set of offerings, so more people can afford to get into the hobby.
How often is "as much as you can", honestly? We don't care that it's your hobby. Pick a different hobby or move to a rural area. Big cars kill people at far higher rates.
Please, watch this video, it summarises nicely the argument against bigger and bigger vehicles and likely addresses most of the excuses you'll come up with:
https://youtu.be/jN7mSXMruEo
It's about the US, but a lot of it is applicable to Australia also.
They don't need to pick a different hobby, they can just hire an off-road vehicle instead. There is no reason for people to be buying vehicles for extremely niche, rare use cases when they can just hire an equivalent for a few weeks.
Money saved on the cost of the vehicle, gas and taxes should more than offset the cost of rental once or twice a year. If it doesn't, tax more.
I'm sure if they're renting offroaders they're aware of that. I did that in Iceland and everything was covered and the vehicle was bent and scratched already when I got it.
The ones in my city cost about $500 per day, and they take an $8,000 deposit. If they can't fix it for $8,000 then they charge an extra fee on top of that, and they will restore it to new car showroom condition - which means just scraping a tree branch could cost more than the deposit.
Worst part is though, they specifically ban all of the popular dirt roads within about ten days drive of the city. The roads you're allowed on, I'd happily travel in my Mazda 3.
The thing is though - even if you set aside all of that... the main thing stopping people from going off road is time, and you'd waste half your weekend picking up the car, checking it for damage, signing paperwork, and then after the trip cleaning it and doing all that again.
And what an awful hobby it is
Why do you say that? What's so awful about seeing parts of our beautiful country that are hard to get to?