“Svalbard Sastrugi Snow” by Bjørn Christian Tørrissen was photographed on September 16, 2023 and is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED – Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International. Photographed on Spitsbergen island, Norway (source).
Battles, Blizzards & Beyond
Tales of Toyota’s World-Renowned Pickup Truck
An all-original account of the Toyota Hilux, the world’s toughest pickup truck and the extreme environments where it thrives.
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Few places are as challenging to traverse as Antarctica, Earth’s most inhospitable continent. The vast, windswept landscape varies from hard ice to deep snow, with just a few rocky beaches. Fields of jagged ice – starmukha – hide gaping crevasses, some over a hundred feet deep and wide enough to swallow a vehicle. Powdery snow […]
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“SDF Technicals in Northern Raqqa Countryside” by VOA News was photographed on December 12, 2016 and is licensed under CC0 1.0 DEED – CC0 1.0 Universal. Not edited by the author. SDF technicals during the Northern Raqqa offensive (source).Operation Inherent Resolve: ISIS v SDF
Perhaps no other group is as closely associated with Hilux technicals as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), also known worldwide as ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant), and commonly called Daesh – a transliteration of the “ISIS” acronym in Arabic, conjugated to mean “bigot” – across the Middle East. Convoys […]
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The Aouzou Strip, site of the Great Toyota WarThe Chadian – Libyan War, aka The Great Toyota War
The Chadian-Libyan war was waged from 1978 to 1987, but a decisive battle at the end of the conflict earned it the name “The Great Toyota War.” The name was first coined in a 1984 Time magazine article reporting on Chad’s civil war and was the first mainstream account of the Hilux technical phenomenon. The […]
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“SDF Technicals in Northern Raqqa Countryside” by VOA News was photographed on December 12, 2016 and is licensed under CC0 1.0 DEED – CC0 1.0 Universal. Not edited by the author. SDF technicals during the Northern Raqqa offensive (source).The Hilux as a Non-Standard Tactical Vehicle, or “Technical”
The most notorious adaptation of the Toyota Hilux is on the battlefield. The Hilux has been conscripted as an unintended warrior for decades. Many in the US were first introduced to the Toyota Hilux from news coverage of wars in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq, where columns of Hilux vehicles paraded through captured cities (packed into […]
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“Freestyling” by R. Walker was photographed on August 31, 2008 and is licensed under CC BY 2.0 DEED – Attribution 2.0 Generic. Color enhanced by the author. Taken in Mountain Ash, New South Wales, Australia (source)What’s a Hilux?
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in IntroductionMost everywhere in the world except the US, the Toyota Hilux is prized as a tough, versatile, and reliable four-wheel drive midsize pickup truck. The Hilux is a practical choice for both commercial and personal use, from construction sites in bustling cities to unpaved roads in rural landscapes. Confident off-road as well as on city […]