Heads turned and there was lots of mumbling when the thorny issue of towing capacity was raised at the national media launch of Toyota’s all-new RAV4. Because it was more than a tad on the light side.
But, Toyota being Toyota, smart engineering was brought to the table and from July production, the RAV4 diesel boosts braked towing capacity to 1,000kgs.
At launch Toyota’s engineers were being conservative launching a brand new model into one of the world’s toughest SUV environments.
Since then there has been considerable work by Toyota engineers both here and in Japan.
As expected launch of the diesel model has had a massive impact for the RAV4 – almost 30 per-cent of the new model sold has been diesel-powered. And when you look at all-wheel-drive RAV4 sales, the diesel model (only sold in AWD) accounts for almost 1-in-2 sales (46 per-cent).
“Diesel SUV sales rose 37 per-cent last year, so the introduction of the RAV4 turbo-diesel has enabled Toyota to compete for the first time in this growth area of the medium SUV segment,” explained Tony Cramb, Toyota’s sales and marketing chief.
