Yes, yes. Serious off-road work is outside the realm of activities for many crossover and SUV drivers, anyhow. But driving down a gravel backroad that the spring melt has left as craggy and pitted as Mickey Rourke? Nailing a pavement crater half the size of Kia Forte on a semi-regular basis? That’s just part of being Canadian.
One road full of such goodies is part of my regular test-drive loop when evaluating crossover and SUV credentials. It’s called Frenchman Lake Road, and it lies about 30 minutes north of Sudbury. I often film video segments on this stretch, and even more often drive down it just because I’m bored and single and want to check out how well the ute-du-jour feels when you give it some lousy surfaces to drive over.
On Frenchman Lake Road, washboards, frost-heaves, potholes and other forms of nastiness are the norm. Until the graders get to it in early summer, it’s a very nasty bit of gravel and mud to drive on.
All of this makes many a unibody-ute feel like they’re going to come apart beneath you. Some of the worst examples I remember were the Jeep Compass, GMC Terrain and Toyota RAV4.
Panels rattle, steering shakes and the road surface’s assault on the suspension creates less-than-sexy sounds that flood the cabin. Ever push a shopping cart full of canned goods across a bumpy parking lot? Same idea.
Some machines, on the other hand, feel built for roads like this. As if the engineers actually drove a test mule through some rough stuff to see how it felt, in case anyone actually used their SUV as an SUV. Imagine that!
    Northern Exposure: Best Pavement-to-Dirt Vehicles. Click image to enlarge |
So anyways. After driving dozens of SUVs and crossovers for thousands of kilometres on the highway, and countless hours down my favourite nasty backroad, I give you my list of machines that bring favourable highway ride quality with them into Frenchman Lake Road.
Land Rover LR4: This is the best machine I’ve ever driven for combined on-road and off-road comfort. On the highway, it’s soft and pleasant without feeling like its got shock absorbers made of pudding. Hit the trails, and even travelling over ruts and moguls at higher-than-probably-advisable speeds, you never feel any harshness. It’s quiet, too, with virtually no suspension noise entering the cabin on the rough stuff. Even the sound of rocks and gravel bouncing off of the wheel well liners is muted nicely. I’ve never driven something that took its luxurious highway ride to the trails this seamlessly. The sophisticated air suspension is largely to thank.
Mazda CX-5: This little ute prioritizes things like driving dynamics and fuel mileage more than off-road performance—but it’s surprisingly tough-feeling in a market full of competitors that turn into rattle-traps on uneven surfaces. Maybe it’s a combination of the agile suspension calibrations and the new stiff, lightweight Skyactiv chassis. The CX-5 is as comfy as it needs to be on the highway, and doesn’t lose much on the camp-road setting. Even washboard-covered surfaces do little to upset it—which is remarkable because most compact models skitter around and lose most of their steering response if you drive over washboards at anything more than a crawl. It doesn’t ride like a Land Rover, but it never feels like it’s having any trouble either. A surprisingly solid-feeling little ute on the rough stuff.
