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[NCFJ]

I have been reading a lot of posts lately about the FJ not living up to it’s off road advertising and I just had to address the issue. This is MY OPINION and is not carved in stone anywhere.

Toyota built the FJ as an off road capable vehicle that can also get you back and forth to work in relative comfort. It did not build a bullet proof off road machine that can handle being pounded on rocks or jumping it. There are scores of testaments to the FJ’s prowess off road in bone stock configuration but the fact remains that if you plan to go to places like Tellico or Moab you are going to need to beef some things up.

The most common additions to the FJ in the form of improving off road performance are lifts and tires. But just adding a lift and bigger tires is not enough. Once you add a lift you change the angle of your front axle shafts. There has been much talk that the angle does not change much, but the fact is that the angle does change. Adding bigger tires adds more rotational weight. Both of these factors add extra stress to the front axles and CVs, there is no getting around it. In order to compensate for the extra stress put on the front axles by these factors, heavy duty axles and CVs are in order. To date I am not aware of any available on the market, although I’ve heard some may well be in the works. By whom I can’t tell you.

Another area of debate is the lower control arms for the rear and their front mounting location. If you are running trails with rocks you must overcome these items will sooner or later encounter damage. In the case of the lower control arm itself, several cases of failure have been reported here. If this part breaks on the trail and you don’t have a replacement you are in deep trouble. I have seen photos of this part broken in half and they are simply not up to the task of taking on rocks and supporting the weight of the machine. Fortunately there are several companies making heavy duty versions of both these parts.

Serious armor is also an area any off roader that likes to play in the rocks should have on their short list of Mods. The stock skid plate on the front end and the gas tank skid plate are simply not up to the challenge of hard trails. Once again there are several after market versions of skid plates available that will make your rig much safer from damage than it is in stock form.

The bumpers on our FJs are also items of concern. Personally I refer to them as Tupperware. Mine have been ripped in a couple of places already. One concern I do have in this area is with the front bumper. There are a couple of very thin walled box tubes stacked on each other that make up the structure behind the Tupperware. My thought is that these are part of the crumple zone designed into the FJ for our protection. So what happens when we remove these and add solid steel bumpers to the front end? Is a hard impact in the front end going to lead to frame damage? I am not qualified to answer this question but logic leads me to believe it may.

So what does all this mean? It means that although the FJ is a very capable off road vehicle in stock form, it does require upgrades to be the trail beast many of us want it to be. This is also true of almost every “off road” vehicle on the market. You may be asking yourself why Toyota did not just put all this stuff on the FJ from the factory, the answer is most likely marketability. Bigger tires, better bumpers, a lift, etc all add to higher cost and lower MPG which would take many prospective buyers out of the market for an FJ. At $30,000 the FJ is a pretty good deal, add $10,000 to that and you’d see far fewer of them, and lets face it, some FJs will never see so much as a fire road and do not require that much gear. So if a vehicle that does not require mods to do what you want it to do is your goal, I might suggest a Unimog