Many vehicles are designed to be really good at certain tasks, which comes at the expense of other abilities. A Ford F-350 can tow 20,000 pounds without breaking a sweat, but wouldn’t be particularly spectacular on a track. A Subaru BRZ could be your autocross weapon, but isn’t going to tow your 7,000-pound camper. Despite this, some cars have some real hidden talents. What cars are surprisingly good at doing what they weren’t designed to do?
I have a reputation in the American Smart community for doing things with the Smart Fortwo that nobody else would dare to do. There was a span of time of about seven years when I owned nothing but Smarts. Whenever I ran into a situation that would normally call for a different vehicle, I often made my Smart do it, anyway, instead of paying for a rental or borrowing someone’s truck.
For years, this meant that if I needed to tow a new motorcycle home, move some furniture, or move out of an apartment, I hitched a U-Haul trailer onto the back of my 2012 Smart Fortwo. These cars are not officially rated to tow anything, yet I managed to tow trailers around Illinois and Wisconsin for some 20,000 miles.
Now that I’m older, a bit nicer to my own cars, and not as willing to play with something of such questionable legality, I don’t tow with Smarts anymore. Instead, I take them off-road! I love proving that you do not need a three-inch lift and 35-inch tires to make a Smart decent off-road. In my experience of actually off-roading a Smart, a decent set of tall snow tires and some good technique are all I need. I’ve gotten my Smarts pretty much anywhere that a 2WD pickup truck can go.
But perhaps my favorite example of making a vehicle do what it wasn’t built to do was making a bone-stock, base Jeep Renegade rule at rallycross. At best, Jeep designed the Renegade to handle some soft off-roading. It was not designed to launch off of tabletop jumps and it was not designed to lay down some seriously hot laps on the track. But that’s what my group of friends and I did one weekend.
Our Renegade laid down some of the fastest lap times that weekend, and even the organizers were shocked because the field that weekend included modified side-by-sides, some rallycross-prepped cars, and at least one real rally car. Yet, here we were getting close to their times on regular street tires in a crossover with an automatic transmission that shifted slower than a teen driver learning a manual.
Here’s where I turn things over to you. What cars have you driven that were unexpectedly good at a job that they were not designed to do?
My FR-S has carried a few bags of topsoil in the trunk without much complaint. A trunk liner goes a long way. Fold-down backseats are great for long stuff, too, and it also got my ’71 Schwinn Stingray home from my dad’s garage attic. In pieces, yes, but it got home.
4th Gen 4Runners with V8s had a suprisingly high tow rating of 7,200lbs. Have towed quite a lot with it over the years.
That is surprising considering the 1st gen Sequoia’s limit is 6500.
People are always surprised to hear that I drive my Fiata in the winter, when the actual fact is that when you put a set of snow tires on them, any sports car does fantastic in the snow. I’d even go so far as saying that it’s even more predictable in the snow than the regular FWD sedans I’ve had before.
People always forget that in the heyday of BMW and Mercedes, these cars were RWD and were regularly taken into the Alps.
Oh, to be a yuppie in an E30 with skis on the roof…
Ditto, when I moved North I traded my Miata for a WRX, but the longer I lived with it, the more I realized I was just scanning for a patch of snow big enough to drive on all Winter, and pining for Winter all Summer. Finally got back to the RWD Roadster life, and it’s way more fun year-round.
I have a friend with a 124 Abarth that also uses his as a winter daily.
I exclusively drive sports cars in the winter, and I live where we get a lot of snow. An LSD is a must. Currently running an e36 M3 and an eighth Gen Civic Si. Preciously I’ve winter driven an e39 M5 and a Mini R56 JCW. The Mini was the only car that struggled in the snow, not because it would get stuck but because snow would pack into the rear suspension until it could no longer move and it would pack into the front wheel wells until it could no longer turn.
My Porsche 944 was surprisingly good at carrying long flat loads in its trunk. With the back seats folded you could easily get long planks of wood or skis in which the 3 Series BMW it replaced could not.
I found that a track-prepped Triumph Spitfire was surprisingly good at moving large furniture, especially couches.
When going to school at UW-Madison, one of the roommates moving in had a Spitfire with a roll bar, and we moved a couple of couches, mattresses, and other large pieces by resting it on the roll bar and then having the passenger keep the item from putting all the weight on the windshield. Worked like a charm.
I will continually defend my ugly duckling, “enthusiast” and car-mag journalist-derided ’10 Focus. Not the best at anything, but did way better at everything than I ever expected. Was a surprisingly comfy & relaxed highway cruiser at moderate (<70) speeds. Its been 6 months and I miss the little turd.
We had a 2008 up until 2020, when the rust finally became a bit too much to feel safe anymore but the powertrain was still good. With a decent set of tires (Cooper CS-5s) it was fun to take corners even with an automatic, and that little car just took everything we threw at it with aplomb.
I’m outside the rust-belt, so mine had nary a speck. The only signs of wear in my 11 years of ownership were a couple battle scars on the bumper covers, a scrape from a Philly parking sign that mostly “buffed out” and some typical cracking of the driver’s seat (tan) leather. Other than 2 or 3 valve cover gaskets, and about that many sets of engines mounts it was fine. I downgraded from Michelins to Generals (from Walmart!) which I initially thought handled terribly, but the problem was actually the rear shocks. $50 for some Monros, basic wrenches and 90 minutes- done. The car had a YouTube video for anything you ever needed to do.
Beetles and Baja racing!
Okay, not gonna argue this too much but remember, with some extra equipment and different bodies they were military vehicles as well, so maybe not that surprising that they more or less were there from the beginning of off road racing.
The Chevy Suburban requiring less distance for 70-0 braking than a Mazda3 genuinely surprised me.
Not personal experience, but:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DMilItpSdUj/
Really, you can go to Prius Offroad’s YouTube channel and….you know what, I’m gonna let that sentence fragment speak for itself.
My 2012 Fiesta is incredibly useful as a utility vehicle.
The looks I get, loading 8 ft lengths of 4x4s and 2x4s at the home depot always makes me smile.
I’ve used it on two moves. I’ve done multiple dump runs in it. I’ve had it so crammed, there’s only a open, human sized void in the driver’s seat.
I really don’t see a reason or need to get anything bigger, and never plan to. When “Fiesty” finally moves on to the racetrack in the sky, I’ll just replace her with another one, or something similar like a Mazda 3 Hatchback.
My 2008 Honda Fit Sport 5MT was truly great as a moving van. It moved me twice including some surprisingly large items including an assembled futon (hatch open) large shelves and dressers (hatch closed) and a whole room full of ikea furniture plus 3 passengers. Not only that but with the MT is was pretty great at also being a snow rally car, it had pretty decent weight over the front end and balance with the mid mounted fuel tank. I had a lot of fun driving it in snow much deeper than it should have been able to handle.
Going with Honda Element. Gonna spare you the obligatory GIF as it’s probably already seared into your brain in maybe green and brown.
I remember ads teeming with young people who were hell bent to make it their generations Beetle. Everybody grooving on its boxy vibes.
Lo and behold, my fellow boomers immediately commandeered every last one of them after we gobbled up all the Aztecs.
….but in our defense we left them to pick amongst a perfectly cromulent fleet of Cubes and Souls and even Scions.
If the Miata Logistics subreddit is to be believed (it is) the Miata is as practical as trucks for hauling large and long items.
My 2008 Explorer is an excellent paperweight!
In America.
Elsewhere, even Canada which follows near-similar towing rules, the smart was rated for towing.
But they’d rather you buy an SUV/Pickup to tow.
What pickup did Mercedes ever sell in North America?!?
they sold and still sell scads of SUV’s. the X-Class in South America was a quickly passing thing, and as such never made it to the US, though I imagine it could have been replicated fairly simply in the US at the Tuscaloosa plant on the GL platform, butthey never did. They did make the L Class truck in the US in the 80’s. But that is not really a pickup.
The Honda Insight Gen 1 the main focus was the highest MPG ever but it resulted to be a good platform for performance bits, suspension modifications and engine swaps. Those things are the definition of sleeper when modified.
My ’65 Suburban is an awesome lumber and sheet material fetcher. It can fit 10ft lengths of 2x with the doors closed, and full 4×8 sheets as well. The low floor height also means loading is as easy as pushing the cart up to the bumper, and then simply pushing the sheets straight into the truck. They’ll drop six inches or a foot into the back.
Just loaded up seven sheets of 3/4″ Advantech in like 30 seconds. All ~550lbs of it. Then a couple 2x right on top down the middle and away I went.
Meanwhile there’s always some contractor having to load panels into their raised up F-4-Million bitching tool boxes being in the way, or it hanging too far out the tail gate, or the general task of having to load each panel individually.
Any old Suburban, Tahoe or minivan is a superior lumber hauler compared to a crew cab ultra short bed pickup truck. It boggles my mind why those are so popular.
Volkswagon Beetles. Even stuck the lightness of them tended to make them decent enough off pavement. add in more appropriate tires and unbolt a few fenders and they were actually surprisingly decent off road. 2WD be damned.
This was my thought. Pismo Beach on the CA central coast is one of the last (the last?) west coast beaches you can drive on. To get to the camping and the dunes you have to cross a small inlet to the sea. At low tide it’s no big deal. At high tide it’s impassible. A fun diversion is to take a chair and some beverages as the tide is coming in and see who risks it and who loses.
One time I was up there and a giant one ton dually pulls up slowly, looks at it, and goes for it. Gets stuck. For absolute comedy, dude in a beetle backs up, floors it and planes across right past the stuck truck who’s waiving for recovery help.
Yeah, the bro-dozers definitely overestimate their abilities. Happens on Rocks and Mud as well. Light rails just fly across the top of Mud too. Just don’t slow down too much.
I was really impressed with the towing capability of my wife’s 04 Sienna. I used to have a good-sized Bayliner and that van towed and launched it with ease. The beam axle out back really helps, it keeps the rear wheels pointed straight up despite the tongue load.
A Toyota RAV4 AWD being good at towing a small camper. It bossed the camper, not the other way. Even got it unstuck from a particularly muddy site. Other campers with bigger rigs had to call tow trucks.
Apparently Rental cars are surprisingly good at drag races, they do not always win but they do it every light for some reason
Everyone knows that rentals only have two throttle positions. On and off.
You’re also legally required to divebomb corners at speed.
There was a Top Gear episode where Jeremy and James May raced in New Zealand, where James was in a sailboat, and Jeremy was in the “fastest car one could get” A rental he didn’t care about, trashed.
It’s a Rental
Don’t be Gentle
Dajiban comes to mind.
Dodge Ram Vans modified in Japan to go racing/drifting.
Beat me to it!
Rental Car is good at everything. Doesn’t even matter what kind of rental it is!
Mexican Nissan subcompacts converted to open air dune buggies agree with that statement.
The VW Beatle was designed as a people car and ended up doing Everything at some point including off road racing and antarctic research transportation.
True to the “people’s car” name.
The only brand new car I’ve ever bought was a 1995 Geo Tracker. It’s designed as a small off-roader, but I drove that thing for years as my commuter. It was 2wd, so it got great gas mileage. It had a short wheelbase, so maneuvering it around town was easy. It was dead-nuts reliable. I had it for 10 years and 150k miles, and only did basic maintenance. Original clutch and rear brakes!
And even though it was 2wd, it wasn’t bad at light off reading and in snow!
That open top and the back bench, perched on a hillside, it would definitely work great for light off-reading as you say!
We had a guy we worked with, who drove a Geo Metro, 50 MPG, and he had like 180K miles on it.
I think with the Jimny being more and more recognized in the US as a “forbidden fruit”, the Tracker and its Vitara sibling are starting to get the recognition they deserve.
It really does feel like the next best thing. Not quite the same retro styling, and IFS, but I think it definitely scratches the same itch, doesn’t require importing, and is significantly more commuter-friendly than a Samarai
I’d love to get a manual 4×4 Geo Tracker before they take off, hard top or convertible doesn’t matter as much to me.
I’d recommend it! Since mine is my daily, I’ve sometimes started to wish that I had one of the steel-roof ones, or a 4-door, but for a second/fun car, I’d go for the full convertible experience.
I’ve also got both a canvas top and a fiberglass top, so I can have a semi-hard top experience in the winter
Only cars I’ve ever bought were a ’95 Geo Tracker and a couple of its variants, and it sure is versatile! Great maneuverability, great fuel economy even with 4WD, good off-road, and a beast in snow!
Storage is really the downside, but for long stuff you can always pull the roof off. I reckon I could get some pretty long 2x4s in there angled up over the windshield, if necessary!