The Toyota Fortuner has been around for a while now but, until recently, it wasn’t offered with a 4×4 automatic driveline. Here’s what we think of this new bi-pedalled Fortuner
Story: Harket Suchde
Photography: Rommel Albuquerque
From flat tarmac to mud tracks and everything else besides, the Toyota Fortuner has always held the reputation for being a go-anywhere sport utility vehicle (SUV) that allows its passengers a taste of luxury too. While these attributes made the car quite popular across the country, there was a constant murmur of complaint from Fortuner enthusiasts regarding the fact that the car’s luxury leanings didn’t extended to having a 4×4 automatic in its bouquet of variants. Toyota took steps to address that, giving us this, the all-wheel-drive (AWD) auto variant at long last.
Not much has changed on the exterior of this new Fortuner. It still takes the aggression-over-artistic styling cues identical to its other, more dated variants. The only differences that you’ll spot are a spot of chrome surrounding the fog-lamps and smoked lamps in the head and tail, apart from the new alloys that look like they’re painted in the 50th shade of grey, and the new grey-bronze colour scheme to go with it.
Climb into this SUV, quite literally, and you’ll notice its new blacked out interior and a shiny new touchscreen infotainment system with in-built sat-nav. The cabin is roomy as ever, and the driver’s perch affords you a commanding, royal view of the undulating road ahead of you. On the safety front, you have dual front airbags now as standard.
Under its bonnet the Fortuner still retains the same 3.0-litre D-4D turbo-diesel mill producing 171 PS at 3,600 revs and now, with the auto-box, churns out 360 Nm of torque between 1,400 and 3,200 RPM. Only now this engine is wedded to a five-speed automatic transmission. The big question is, how does it feel to drive? The big answer also happens to be a long one.
