4WD Dilution Theory: Why all off road vehicles inevitably lose capability

This is a phenomenon I've noticed for a very long time, but I've finally put everything together and found a way to illustrate it. The diagram I created explains itself pretty well, but I'll add a little to it. If you read this all, it'll be like getting new eyes, you'll see it everywhere.

This is not meant to be specific to the 4runner, but all 4wd vehicle sold within the US to non-commercial buyers. The first 3 generations of 4runner improved in some ways, often this process doesn't have to be linear or absolute.

The Catalyst
We start with 2 vehicles, they have a laser focus on their purpose, so using one to do the job of the other would be unpleasant. But a catalyst will change that. This catalyst can be more families buying it to use as a family vehicle, or a social media trend, or a personal preference to how a vehicle looks, or movie appearance.


The Erosion
Whatever the catalyst, the buyer base is diluted with people who still want their vehicle to suit their needs but didn't buy the best vehicle for themself for whatever reason. So reviews and feedback will be more from these people and less from the people who actually bought it to use for that purpose.

The more this goes on the faster it happens. If a generation becomes more palatable to a larger audience, then the next generation will have an even larger percentage of customer feed back from people who bought the vehicle even though it didn't suit them.

The Hard Limit
This continues until the "Hard Limit" is met. The designers realize that they could keep down the path, but they would be making a mass appeal vehicle instead of a 4wd. Where this point happens is different for every model.

For example, the Jeep Wrangler's limit is 74 inches wide. After a steady increase in width for 3 generations someone at Jeep when designing the JL said "74 inches is as wide as we can make it before it becomes too wide for the trails we show outdoorsy people driving down in our ads."

Nissan had a different limit for the Pathfinder, whatever it was it wasn't before it destroyed the allure that nameplate had. And that's the risk, you need a few people to actually use the vehicle so the nameplate maintains an allure. If you make it suck, those few people stop buying it and the vehicle stops being associated with the thing that sold it.

The 4runner has yet to reach this limit. The 6th gen is less capable than the 5th gen as a consequence of increasing the size. It probably lost the metal skid plates on all but the off road trims, in contrast even 2wd 5th gen 4runners came with metal skid plates.

The Mitigation
An option many companies do when they face a hard limit is to try to mitigate the dilution with technology. Land Rover/Range Rover is the best example of this.

The Defender until recently was rather close to a Wrangler, solid axles, spartan interior, boxy shape to help off road, and high aspect tires. But the new Defender is round, has a rather luxurious interior, and low clearance. The small windows make it harder to judge where you are on a trail or fording a river. So rather than do the conventional thing, they gave it a ton of cameras to help you see, and a sensor to let you know how deep the water is. They added complicated air suspension to raise the ride height (which helped comfort at a cost).

The affect of all this technology is a high tech vehicle that cost a ton of money. It also means you rely on a lot of complex systems that can break and be impossible to fix on trail. On the 4runner, the mitigation measures are reserved for high trim models to keep the base price down, while being able to point to these trims when they say "the 4runner hasn't gone soft, look at what it does (*optioned shown is the very expensive trim you need to buy to do this)".

So What?
The newest 4runner has a really high price, we don't know it yet, but we can assume. If you want to get a 4wd standard model we can guess it will be in the mid-40s range. It will be more technologically complex by a large margin because that was what it required to move the vehicle and still fit everything the modern buyer wants.

What you lose is a lot more money, we have yet to see how reliable this new generation will be. There is no way to fight this affect, because once it starts it rarely reverses or slows down. The Wrangler is rather inspirational because it is still attainable and hasn't sacrificed too much. You can sell more school buses if you make them into SUVs, but it's up to companies to realize that making every vehicle like a best seller defeats the purpose.

 

Well written and well said. The affordability issue comes loud and clear in this dilemma.