It will not look good on Instagram. It is not an effective mating call. And it certainly won’t get as far down the trail as a 4Runner. But if you want to do big, ambitious adventures on a budget, you can’t beat the humble minivan.
The three key factors for any adventure rig are capability, endurance, and reliability. Options that provide all four are popular and subsequently quite expensive. If you want a lightly used Tacoma, 4Runner, Ranger, GX460, or Land Cruiser, you’re going to be spending at least $35,000. Many of us, therefore, have to sacrifice one or more of these core factors.
One option is a two-door Wrangler. It’ll beat any pickup in terms of on-trail capability and should be reliable enough, but there’s a reason they aren’t the favorite for overlanding. With a relatively small cargo area and a droning, punishing highway experience, the Wrangler has neither the space nor road manners for long-term endurance. Older higher-mileage versions of the Tahoe, Land Cruiser, 4Runner, and GX all offer endless endurance, but unless you’re very experienced you don’t want to be 30 miles from pavement when your car decides not to start.
The point makes itself. What good is capability and reliability if you can’t bring the gear and people you need to have fun? What use is capability and space if you have to stay within range of a tow truck at all times? Lacking off-road capability limits you, but lacking confidence in your ride’s reliability stops the adventure before it starts.
The degree to which capability matters is also highly overblown. Adventures are about discovery and pushing your own limits, and over dozens of trips a less-capable car has never inhibited either goal. A less capable rig enhances an adventure.
Let’s start where I started, in the off-site parking of Seattle-Tacoma International airport, alongside my buddy Mark. Our plans were haphazard, sorted via text from my home in California and his in Boston. We had eight days of camping ahead of us, we didn’t have sites booked for four of those, we didn’t know whether we had two more people coming, and we had only what gear of mine could fit in a checked bag. There would be a music festival, and rafting, and dozens of miles of hikes before we returned to Seattle, at which point Mark would leave and I would drive down the entire West Coast in a car I hadn’t yet seen. It may not have been the Dakar, but it certainly had the ingredients of an adventure.
For shelter we had my beaten-up Coleman tent, two hammocks, and a 2022 Toyota Sienna hybrid. It did not have all-wheel drive, or the factory lift you’d get on a Woodland version, but it’d end up on the dirt anyway. Because last year, we had done a more luxe version of the same trip, in a $200,000 custom-built overlander that solved every problem for us. Over 2000 miles, we never once wondered if we could get there, or played around its edges, or dared to risk scratching it. This year we were doing it with simpler equipment, which meant we were going to push it harder.
The Sienna excelled. After we both got too tired to drive, we folded the third row, slid the (non-removable) second row forward, and stuffed our bags in the front. On a viciously empty section of the Idaho backwoods, where abandoned houses led right up to the national forest, we slept two people in reasonable comfort. Had it been cold, we could have idled the fuel-sipping Sienna all night, the engine kicking on and off when we needed extra heat.
When we finally made Montana, we didn’t take it easy on the Sienna. We charged down dirt roads, Scandi flicked the Toyota around through gravel-S bends, and piled it full of trash, beer, gear, and people. When our two friends joined halfway through the trip, it swallowed their stuff, too, and with our tent pitched at camp all was well. When our time at the site expired, we took to the dirt again, this time following a winding path that led to the shadow of a colossal dam. We pitched the tent and slung the hammocks, but had we thrown a roof tent on the Sienna it’d be able to sleep all four of us in or on it.
Over a thousand or so miles, it returned over 30 mpg, did everything we needed, and delighted off the road. With more time and planning, we could push it further down the rutted backwoods routes we found, but being out on the dirt in Montana is a good reminder: If you can drive down an unmaintained dirt road, you can reach more amazing places than you will ever have time to visit in a lifetime. There are countless hidden valleys, amazing lakes, towering mountains, and secluded forests you can reach with nothing but a minivan. Surely the set of places a Land Cruiser can reach is greater, but the key point is that both sets are functionally infinite; If you crave discovery, you can get it in a minivan.
But not all trips have to be adventures. Sometimes a good rig is about getting you to a place you’ve seen before, and love. For me, that place is the patch of land directly south of Joshua Tree National Park. It is not by any means the most perfect patch around, not nearly as beautiful as the park it abuts. There’s a highway within visual range, and mostly flat desert around. But it’s so quiet that you can hear each others’ breath, so dark that you can see the Milky Way on a moonless night, and so unrestricted that you can show up with no reservation, have a fire with as many people as you’d like, and never disturb anyone. It’s comfort, not discovery.
I’ve been there probably 12 times since moving to Southern California, and I don’t think the trip has ever been as painless as it was in a Honda Odyssey I had borrowed for a photo shoot. From the modern minivan’s perfect on-road manners, to the way you can lift the seats out and use them around the fire, to the on-board vacuum I used to clean up firewood crumbs, the Odyssey is a painless way to move two to six human adults anywhere you want to go. It trundled through some open desert, plodded along an ultra-rough desert dirt road, and swallowed everything I could possibly think to bring, with room for another week’s worth of supplies.
That isn’t everything when it comes to adventuring. The easy cleaning of a pickup bed, the all-weather capability of a proper 4x4, and the cool factor of a properly-modded GX, those are all nice luxuries. But the Sienna (and the Odyssey, too) got us out there. When it comes to adventuring, that’s what matters most.
Arguably the most fickle member of the Road & Track staff, Reviews Editor Mack Hogan is likely the only person to ever cross shop an ND Miata with an Isuzu Vehicross. He founded the automotive reviews section of CNBC during his sophomore year of college and has been writing about cars ever since.
