Thread: School me on commercial vehicles.

Also Toyotas are a huge issue as they seem to be the worst at un****ing their supply chain. Most OEM’s are around 3 to 6 months delivery at the moment but Toyota is around 2 years so this on its own almost counts them out. The Boss isn’t happy about that after buying over 40 of them in the last 10 years.

Isuzu DC ute, or Isuzu MUX.

All the current crop of diesel utes are work vehicles, not luxo offroad things like you're used to....... RRC, Disco?, 101 .

I find it amusing that people expect something like a rok or a ranger or a lux will go offroad like the D1 they used to own.

Have driven them all now and the Isuzu would be #1, mostly because of the effortless torque of its under stressed donk.

Also shoulder room seems bigger than lux, ranger, rok.

DL

D-Max or BT 50

Just purchased an MUX, I know it's not quite the same as the D-Max but similar platform and same for the BT. 3.5 tonne tow capacity.
Delivery with most brands is a problem so get in sooner rather than later.

You'll hate all the electronics, lane departure, auto braking, electronic park brake etc. etc.
On the MUX you can quickly remove the lane departure but the auto braking has to be done through a menu, I do it for longer trips but it's a PITA.

All the beeping, 'check your surroundings' messages while you're in traffic are ticking me off. This morning with frost on the windscreen there were warnings that auto braking & lane departure weren't working.....frost over the camera's. Maybe a big sticker to cover the camera's would work ??

Best of luck.

Colin

Have you tried lowering the tyre pressures on the Hilux, You will be supprised at the difference in the ride quality

Not withstanding your issue above with Tojos, a mate just this week got a new Prado fitted with a GVM upgrade prior to rego which pushes it into the realm of being a commercial vehicle. The savings more than paid for the GVM upgrade.

Regards,
Tote

So I found some interesting reading - the Fringe Benefits Tax for vehicles is quite a complicated setup and it seems a lot abuse the system - mainly along the personal use bit but there is a line in the regs that say “if the total determined passenger weight exceeds the remaining load capacity the dual cab will be subject to FBT for all private usage (including trips to and from work).”

So more research to be done on the Ranger models as some of these have piddly load ratings and may be excluded.

The search continues…

Also if you only have the work vehicle and don’t have a private vehicle then FBT applies,but the system is abused as you said.Difficult for the tax office to keep up with it all unless they dig deep,but hopefully they after the big fish…

We paid around $4K FBT on the Cruiser last year even though it’s plated commercial as we don’t have a private vehicle.
All the other vehicles we have are FBT exempt,but are not necessarily not used for a lot of private use…

It doesn’t get used much for personal use. Maybe a little more than the ATO would like but not much. They say under 1000km a year and no trip more than 200km and I doubt I’d hit those marks to be honest.

We take SWMBO car everywhere outside work.