Driving the ultimate Aussie off-road expedition vehicle

If you want to do a lap of Australia, a proper lap where no remote track or town is off limits, you’ve got two options: tow an off-road caravan, or drive an all-in-one motorhome.

Caravans are heavy, and you’re not going to be doing anything too gnarly without unhooking the 'van from your tow vehicle. Motorhomes are a simpler affair, but very few are capable of going properly off-road.

But if you want the ultimate go-anywhere expedition tourer, limited only by how brave you are, you get a Mercedes-Benz Unimog with one of Unidan Engineering’s inhouse-built camper bodies.

These extreme-duty, go-anywhere military-inspired vehicles are the most capable off-roaders money can buy, and Gold-Coast-based Unidan has been restoring, customising and improving them since 2011. They even became Australia’s only dedicated Unimog dealer in 2019, so they know these trucks inside and out.

We were invited to join them at Springs 4x4 Park, just south of Warwick in Queensland, to check out some of their latest and greatest off-road camper creations, alongside a handful of customers who plan to put their freedom machines to the test.

Unidan hosts a customer event like this once a year, with as many as 30 owners coming along to test the limits of their vehicles, alongside the people who built them.

It’s a chance for owners to ask questions, learn more about their Unimogs, and there’s plenty of off-road coaching thrown in.

This trip saw 12 customers join, coming from as far as Western Australia, for a weekend of all-out 4x4 action. These customers are here to learn the limits of their Unimog campers, under the expert instruction of the Unidan team.

Leading the convoy and offering plenty of tips and tricks along the way is Springs 4x4 Park owner, Lucas Bree, who’s piloting his blue Unimog – one that belongs to Unidan Engineering but lives out here as a promotional vehicle.

In case anything goes wrong, military man Scott Malone, of TruBlu Off-Road Recovery, is here in his ex-army Unimog. Because, if you come unstuck in a Unimog, the only thing getting you out is another one!

The community spirit here is evident, as owners come together over a shared love of adventure. All of them, unsurprisingly, are comfortable doing the advanced off-road tracks around the park.

“As much as it’d be easier to throw customers the keys and say, ‘see you later’, we know that they’re going to be taking them to the most remote places in Australia,” explains Unidan’s Business Development & Sales Manager, Tiarni West.

“We want to know that they’ve got the confidence and we do these events so they can ask questions, we can jump in the truck with them, and we guide them through tracks we know they’re going to be able to take them through," she said.

“Once they finish the weekend they’ve got so much more confidence and they can explore so much further. I just don’t ever want to see a Unimog at a caravan park, or on the easy tracks – we have Unimogs to go where no one else can go and we want to show them how to do that!”

After a brief orientation, the owners each talk through their Unimog builds, where they’ve taken them and where they plan to go in the future. We hear stories of Simpson Desert crossings, sticky situations out on the Oodnadatta Track, and plenty more. These guys have been everywhere.

Talking with owners, their reasons for buying a Unimog, equipped with a Unidan camper body, are all pretty much the same: to go anywhere.

But Tiarni reminds us, early on in the day, not to call them a motorhome.

“We don’t want to call them motorhomes, they’re expedition vehicles,” she says.

“To us, a motorhome has not much water, not much fuel, not much storage. We’re the complete opposite, we’ve got as much storage as we can get, as much water as we can get – we want to stay off grid as long as possible.”

These campers are also designed for conditions most motorhomes simply wouldn’t survive in, which explains why they don’t belong at a powered campsite.

“You could literally hose it out with a firehose, if you left your windows open at Finke Desert Race or something like that,” Tiarni says.

“You’re not going to have to worry about rotting, warping, deteriorating or corrugations shaking your truck apart. You can take these wherever you want to.”

Unidan offers two in-house built expedition body ranges for Unimog models, consisting of the popular Adventurer and larger Odyssey.

We’ll be testing the Adventurer model, which is a 4.3-metre modular camper capable of going anywhere you can take a Unimog.

A big point of difference is that the Unidan camper bodies use a torsion-free subframe for more flex, and to ensure nothing cracks. The unique design of the Unimog chassis requires this mounting system, which uses three pivot points and no hard mounts, allowing the camper to move independently of the truck.

The Unidan models also offer a low centre of gravity, ensuring off-road stability is maintained. Seeing where owners take these, it’s a feature we think is pretty damn important.

A range of tough materials are used across the camper ranges, which sit on a steel frame with a fibreglass composite body. Aluminium, stainless steel and other waterproof materials are used to keep the build light but extremely strong. It’s 100 percent waterproof too, so mud won’t hurt it one bit.

Inside, a double bed sits east-west at the back of the camper, while a kitchen, two-person dining area and multi-purpose bathroom occupy the other end. A 200Ah Enerdrive B-Tec battery with 2000W inverter handles the electronics, fed by three 150W Enerdrive solar panels.

Storage is where these really shine, with as much as 576 litres of overhead storage and 360 litres of exterior storage. It’s also, as you’d expect, designed to keep everything stowed away during rough off-road work. There’s also 165 litres of water storage under the bed.

The all-important question is how much it costs to get into a Unidan camper like the ones here, but Tiarni explains that it’s less than people expect.

“We can get someone into a 219 Unimog, which we call the baby of the Unimog family, with our Adventurer body on the back, for around $400,000 plus GST,” she says.

“Of course, everyone just adds and adds and adds to these trucks. There are some trucks here closer to a million, but none here are over that million dollar mark," she continued.

“It really depends how you want to spec it, but you can get on the road for a very reasonable price.”

It’s pretty rare to see this many Unimogs in one place, and it’s even rarer to see them with camper bodies on the back, so we were eager to check them out in action.

After begging a few owners for a drive, none trusted us to manhandle their pride and joy on the rough tracks here at Springs 4x4 Park. Thankfully, Tiarni was kind enough to throw me the keys to one of Unidan’s demo models, for a run around the park.

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The first thing you notice is that these are a full-on truck, but don’t let that scare you off. Once aboard the Unimog, it’s no different to driving a car aside from the fact everything's bigger, right down to the truck-like steering wheel.

Having driven plenty of heavy trucks, from just about every manufacturer, I can tell you the Unimog drives more like a big 4x4 wagon than a truck. This largely comes down to its multi-link coil suspension, versus the rougher-riding leaf set-ups found in most off-road trucks, and the automated manual is simple to operate too.

These Unimogs are incredibly well specced from the factory, with all of the serious off-road features you could ever want. While there are a fair few model variants, the Unidan crew help customers choose the right model for their needs.

The U5023 model we tested features a 5.1-litre four-cylinder turbo-diesel engine producing 170kW of power and 900Nm of torque, running through an automated manual transmission with eight forward gears and six reverse gears.

It’s also got portal axles and torque tube suspension, which make for incredible ground clearance and articulation while keeping important driveline components tucked away from rocks and other hazards. Unidan also sets these trucks up to be self-recoverable, and apparently they’re yet to find a customer who can’t get themself out of trouble.

The gearbox is capable of running as a fully automated manual, or if you want more control a clutch lever pops out from under the footwell and it becomes a regular manual. I don’t know of another vehicle on the market that offers this, and it works incredibly well.

In manual mode, which is what we preferred to use off-road, you use the clutch to take off and shift, but have to pre-select gears using a stalk on the right side of the wheel. Basically, you pre-select your gear, then get off the throttle and clutch-in to allow the ‘box to shift for you.

It gives you the option to run around town in a full automatic, while taking control in manual mode off-road, and it’s pretty well impossible to mess up a shift.

The 5.1-litre four-pot is pushing a fair bit of weight, so don’t expect it to feel rapid. It does, however, offer a mountain of torque which coupled with short gearing makes the Unimog a stout off-road performer.

While it isn’t quick getting up to speed, you don’t notice the extra weight it’s carrying with a camper body on the back. I’ve driven one with a tray, and you’d never know you were carrying an extra two-or-so tonnes on this one.

Quite frankly, these Unimogs put other light- and medium-duty 4x4 trucks to shame both on- and off-road, courtesy of a torquey engine, sharp-shifting transmission and compliant coil-sprung suspension.

Now, the only real condition to driving one of these, if you’re getting out of something smaller, is you’ll need a medium-rigid licence, or higher. That’s an easy fix, and you’ll be a better operator for it.

These weigh in around 10 tonnes wet with one of the Unidan camper bodies, with a GVM of up to 14.1-tonnes, but most owners de-rate them to sit just below the 12-tonne mark. Of course, you can specify them to your needs, so weights will vary.

The benefit is that these are a full-size truck, capable of carrying a lot more weight than they are with a lightweight camper body fitted. Whether you’re on the highway or navigating a challenging outback track, they’re capable of more than you’re ever likely to put them through.

Is this the ultimate go-anywhere camper? We think so.

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