After having my own business building custom overland vehicles, I quickly learned how to make a reliable overlander. Being reliable was very important to me as I would be traveling to some extremely remote areas, and if your vehicle were to leave you stranded there it could quickly turn life threatening.

I decided to keep the engine aspects rather stock, only upgrading parts that would help with reliability.

I would change almost everything else, from suspension, wheel bearings, brakes, to large custom fully contained campers mounted to heavy duty custom chassis.

I firmly believe that being a overlander is not being an offroader, I attribute off-roading to rockclimbing and beating your vehicle up on very very rough and challenging terrain. Overlanding, is still traversing challenging terrain but its built for touring not rock crawling. I didn’t need all this power and insane long travel suspension with any knobs and dials.

I have built three overland vehicles so far in Africa, a 1999 Defender 130, 1998 Land Rover Discovery 1, and a 2012 Toyota 78 series Troopcarrier.

After doing multiple trips I narrowed down that the Toyota was the best fit for me, had the right amount of room, and reliability I was searching for. The others were either too big or too small, but never lacked in the reliability sector.