Hi Brutus,
We have the CRD commander and just got back from 10000km trip round much of Aus, so starting to get a bit of a feel for it now.
3rd row seats: have no idea how hard they are to remove, but when they are folded down flat they just seem to form a normal boot space (we didn't use them at all on our trip).
Bullbar: no-one makes them yet. I have a number of people keeping an eye out for me. The only option seems to be the factory nudge bar. So, at the moment I have nowhere to put my driving lights.
long range tank: was talking to a jeep dealer on tuesday who reckons LRA does make an aux tank for them. I sent an email to LRA yesterday - will report back what I find out.
We tow a van around 1.5t. From our trip, I haven't really worked out a fuel consumption average yet, but at a guess I would say somewhere between 16 and 16.5l/100kms. This is a bit high for my liking. 4x4 Australia rates them at 14.5 average when towing a similar sort of size van. I don't think the engine has really loosened up yet. From all reports, this could happen anywhere up to 40000kms (depending on how lucky/unlucky you are).
Had one tank where I did around 18 (into a stiff wind for the whole tank). On fraser island, in the sand, was 18.8, which I didn't think was actually too bad for sand. I also had one tank which was 14. All seems very odd to me how much it varies, given that generally I had the cruise control set at 94kms (according to the GPS - about 98kms on the speedo) for the whole trip.
One thing I can definitely say is that the car has a huge amount of power/torque. Had absolutely no trouble overtaking - you would not even notice you had the van on the back when you have to gun it to get around someone slower.
Bought a 4x4 Australia towing mag while I was away. Had a towing test between commander, pathfinder, terracan, prado and pajero (strangely didn't include patrol or cruiser) and commander whipped them all by staggering margins. In some of the tests the commander and (I think it was) the pathfinder were the only ones to finish within the allotted time. The most surprising thing was, given the whole article was about towing, at the end the journo said that he would rank the commander 3rd because he's not convinced about its offroad potential once its unhitched and you've got to where you're going (which didn't seem to be anything that they were testing for). This certainly was not a reflection of any of the tests they conducted. Funny how you can change the whole result of testing by adding a few gratuitous comments at the end.
Anyhow, hope this helps.
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'03 Intense Blue TJ: 33" claws 3.5" RE lift
'14 WK2: offroad pack
Previously, XH and XJ
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