Single Use Only

When new-car manufacturers no longer make your perfect touring vehicle, it’s time to create your own.

- Matt Raudonikis

THE traditional 4x4 ute or pickup, depending on which side your bread is buttered, was always a single cab-chassis. The perfect tool for getting you and your offsider, plus a load of whatever you’re hauling, to wherever you wanted to go.

Over the years utes have become more family-friendly, with double-cab bodies and a raft of safety and convenience features; but the old single-cab really has remained the realm of the farm truck, missing out on the best of factory equipment.

Cut down and often stretched Land Cruisers and Patrols are a great way to get the functionality of a ute with the comforts and equipment only a 4x4 wagon comes with. The Land Cruiser 200 is a popular candidate for such a conversion and we’ve seen them in many guises including five-seaters, seven-seaters, 4x4 and 6x6, but generally, they are always four-door double-cab bodies. What you’re looking at here is one of the few single-cab LC200s we’ve seen.

Mick Whitehead had what was for many years his perfect outback touring 4x4: a GU Patrol coil-cab. After buying the Nissan new and having engineer-approved 35s, the Patrol served Mick on many trips. As the Nissan drivetrain aged and NSW registration changed to make engineering a newer car more difficult, Mick replaced the TD42 engine and manual gearbox with a 1HD-FTE Toyota engine and the associated five-speed auto transmission, to create something special. But after more years and thousands more kilometres, you couldn’t hide the age of the GU and Mick went looking for something new.