Toyota Hilux EV struck by falling caravan in Top Gear tribute, drives away – more stunts to come

Hardcore Top Gear fans will remember that in 2003, Jeremy Clarkson tried to kill an old Toyota Hilux by subjecting it to ever harsher punishments, famously failing to do so. Twenty-three years later, Toyota UK has paid homage to one of the stunts by updating it, swapping out the little red fourth-gen for a brand-new ninth-gen EV to showcase its robustness.

The company decided to scope out Reddit to decide which test to recreate – repeatedly hitting the pick-up truck with a one-tonne wrecking ball or dropping a caravan on it. It says it received hundreds of responses that overwhelmingly chose the latter.

With that settled, the Hilux was brought to the Bentwaters airfield in Suffolk, where a caravan was craned nine metres up and dropped directly on top of it. The truck suffered only a cracked windscreen, a dented roof and a misshapen bed, and once engineers made sure it was safe, it powered on immediately and drove off without an issue.

Okay, so the caravan wouldn’t have touched any of the mechanical bits (especially with the battery being buried beneath the floor), but it’s still impressive to see the body structure holding up so well. Toyota claims that the battery would have taken a beating itself, having been subjected to deep-water driving tests, a battering over rough terrain and total immersion in water during development.

For what it’s worth, the 59.2 kWh NMC battery is sealed in its own Diamond Shield battery cage and can withstand the same 700 mm of water wading as combustion-engined Hilux models. It’s a good job the EV is nigh-on indestructible, because it’s not exactly great at being, you know, an EV, with a range of just 257 km on the WLTP cycle.

And the caravan drop was just the start – Toyota UK says it has given the keys to the Top Gear Magazine‘s YouTube channel (which, by the way, is also owned by the BBC but is only tangentially related to the defunct TV show), and we’re told to watch this space. A submersion in the sea next, perhaps?

GALLERY: Toyota Hilux EV in Malaysia, non-crashed