Top Gear's Magnetic North Pole Toyota Hilux - Our Car

This is the Toyota Hilux that Jeremy Clarkson and James May took to the Magnetic North Pole on Top Gear.

It’s owned by Arctic Trucks - the company that Top Gear chartered to run the expedition in 2007. 

They took care of everything from building the vehicles, planning the trip, running it, and then transporting the cars back to their UK base afterwards.

The company specialises in creating arctic exploration vehicles, modifying existing cars like the Hilux, Land Rover Defender, Toyota Land Cruiser and Volkswagen Amarok to tackle tough conditions. They do this by beefing up the frames and bodywork, adding massive 35” or 37” tyres, upgrading the suspension, and making a number of other changes to make sure they can handle the torture they’ll face.

In the case of the Top Gear Hilux, we can still see the modifications they made to get the car ready for Jeremy and James - among the mods are wide wheel arches, branded sump guard, shotgun, and, of course, Jeremy's bumper dumper.

It’s a vehicle which is eminently capable, and the first thing you notice is its size. The car is huge, dwarfing everything else around it, and sitting well above the six foot mark. Its size doesn’t preclude it from travelling on the roads though - the AT team actually just got back from a trip to the FAT Ice Race in Austria, having driven it from the UK base over through France and Germany on their way to compete in the race in Zell am See. 

They manually put 500 studs into the tyres (which cost £2,500 each), raced, then removed the studs and drove back - continuing the Hilux’s already impressive legacy.

“It’s only got about 50,000 miles on the clock,” Arctic Trucks’ Carrim Bundhun told us, “but it’s hard miles”.

So, what were the Top Gear guys like? By all accounts they pulled their weight, and knew how to have fun.

“The comments from the team were that all the guys are really, really focused on making good TV,” Carrim told us. “Even though they do some things that people might consider to be irresponsible, they know the difference between being able to do stuff that’s good for TV and crossing a line safety-wise.

“Top Gear make good TV but they’re not polar explorers.”

While the Magnetic North Pole Hilux is the company’s most well-known vehicle and record, it’s far from their only one - they have a habit of setting world records and firsts in arctic conditions. 

Arctic Trucks were behind the expedition to be the first tyre-based vehicles to drive on Antarctica’s high plateau in 1996, ran the first expedition to drive through all seven continents between 2012 to 2018, and ran the first wheeled vehicle to travel from the 1823 Magnetic North Pole to the South Pole in 2023 with a heavily-modified Nissan Ariya.

So, what are the team’s plans for the car? According to Carrim, they’re going to keep using it until it can’t go any more - which might take a while.

“We love it. We’ll keep driving it until it dies, but the problem is that it will never die.”