Iceland is a country where travel can be difficult – only 11% of the land is habitable, another 11% is covered in glaciers, snow coats everything more than a couple of miles inland for up to ten months of every year, mountain roads frequently have glacial rivers running through them, a lot of roads are gravel, a lot of roads are mere tracks and there are regular earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. That’s not a place where a Nissan Micra is really going to be the best vehicle for any journey outside Reykjavik.
And so Iceland has an abundance of large vehicles, not to mention a roaring industry in importing and modifying them. I can rarely resist taking a photo of an interesting large vehicle so here’s a photoset featuring them.
At the bottom of the scale we have the modified personal 4×4. The car itself isn’t excessively big but it’s often on enlarged suspension and wheels. This one is equally at home running around the capital and making forays into the Highlands, although this really is the absolute minimum vehicle you want for fords, glaciers and lava fields.
Up a bit more is the large 4×4, the kind often used by tour companies for taking small groups into the wilderness. These are the ones you don’t often see outside Iceland; at least I’ve rarely, if ever, seen anything like this in the UK.
Next the mega 4×4. These ones are usually converted minibuses and transit-style vans, raised up very high, on really big wheels. Purpose-wise, they cross over with the mere large 4x4s, they just take more passengers. Sometimes they have multiple sets of doors, making them look like the stretched limos of the 4×4 world.
Then there’s the ultra-tough tour bus, the kind with all the extra removed from the inside because it would only fall off eventually anyway, and the suspension raised to cope with the terrain. A 4×4 coach is quite a vehicle to travel on and it’s the experience of a lifetime if your coach driver decides to overtake a mere large 4×4 in a deep fast glacial river. Warning, though – these are modified from old coaches, so it doesn’t matter if they get irreversibly damaged, which means they’re frequently mechanically unreliable. Expect breakdowns in inconvenient places.
On the second branch down from the top, we have expedition trucks. This was my first experience of Icelandic vehicles, jetlagged & befuddled in the dark at 8am. These are 4×4 multi-passenger vehicles, smaller than the tour buses but built to handle a little more.
Special mention to the biggest snow plough I’ve ever seen:
And finally, at the top of the tree, we have the custom-built monster machines. They’re usually made to crawl over glaciers and at least one of these, if not two of them, is an 8×8 hybrid of a coach, a heavy-duty lorry and an ex-NATO military missile carrier. If you’re interested in spotting one of these behemoths, there’s almost always one parked in the corner of the Gullfoss car park, waiting for its turn to trundle up to Langjökull.
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