Top-5 must-have 4WD accessories

Here we’ve listed five 4WD vehicle accessories that should be fitted to any vehicle heading bush, even on day trips.

These items are bolt-on or wired-in accessories as distinct from portable essentials such as first aid kit, navigation GPS, recovery bag, emergency food and water, and communications gear that also should be carried on every trip.

’ROO BAR

A front bar provides protection for a 4WD’s vital fluid heat exchangers and is a bush-travel essential, no matter what the vociferous pedestrian-safety lobby says.

A bar that complies with airbag triggering requirements and is as pedestrian-friendly as possible should be on every 4WD that ventures off the beaten track.

Today’s 4WD has a relatively unprotected front end, with air-conditioning condenser, intercooler, radiator and sometimes a transmission oil cooler, all mounted immediately behind a piece of thin plastic that’s laughingly called a bumper bar.

Even a mild brush at low speed with a tree, kangaroo, wombat, emu or wallaby can cause sufficient damage to immobilise the vehicle.

’Roo bars are made from plastic, aluminium or steel and their impact resistance is in that order. The bar testing we’ve witnessed shows that plastic and aluminium bars don’t have the strength of steel ones, but they’re lighter and that may be an important consideration in the case of smaller 4WDs, especially softroaders.

Bars are required to have as smooth an external profile as possible, to minimise pedestrian injury and must not have forward projections, such as fishing-rod holders and light and aerial brackets. Driving lights may project, provided they can fold back behind the bar profile when struck.

CARGO BARRIER

Over the years we’ve seen some horrific accidents, and a few have stuck in our minds including one, where a woman was killed by a pot of honey that was sitting on the rear parcel shelf of a sedan, until her car had a frontal impact that sent the honey pot hurtling forward.

Another was where a driver suffered serious leg injuries when a scuba diving tank in the back of his 4WD wagon shot forward in a frontal impact and finished up dislodging the driver’s seat from its mountings.

There’s no point buying a four or five star safety-rated 4WD, with multiple airbags and seat-belt pre-tensioners, if you’re going to get smacked in the back of the head by unrestrained freight flying forward.

It’s essential that all cargo is restrained, but most 4WD wagon and ute cargo hooks aren’t capable of withstanding the load imposed by a collision, even if the cargo straps or ropes are.

A compliant cargo barrier can stop heavy objects moving forward in an accident and can contribute to the vehicle’s body strength in the case of a roll-over.

BACKUP BATTERY

The worst sound you can hear, when you’re on your own in a remote bush area, is the sullen ‘click’ of a starter motor that’s not getting enough current from the starting battery.

With modem 4WD security systems starting batteries can be lightly drained constantly and any hiccup in the charging regime can cause a cumulative draining effect that shows up finally in a flat battery.

Even if you’re parked at the top of a long downhill slope, forget clutch-starting, because today’s electronically-injected engines demand some battery power before they’ll fire. Of course, most 4WDs these days are automatics, so ‘clutching’ isn’t even an option.

Sometimes, you can use your jumper leads between the battery and starter motor to aid current flow enough to fire up the engine, but it’s a long shot.
Much better, at this point, is to be able to connect your backup battery and crank the engine into life.

This backup can be in the form of a portable jump-starting device, charged (hopefully) from a cigarette lighter outlet, but much better is a hefty battery that’s wired in, via an electronic dual-battery charging system.

Most of the time this battery is used for running a fridge and camp lights, but it’s a vital backup to your starting battery, should it go flat for some reason. Battery backup is a must, even for short forays into the bush.

TYRE PRESSURE MONITOR

This is a legal requirement in the USA on all new vehicles and should be so here, as well. A system that warns the driver of a leak in a tyre allows early repair, before the leak causes severe pressure drop and overheating of the tyre that results in a blowout.

However, the US law doesn’t stipulate how the monitoring is done, so many vehicle makers have opted for a system that measures a change in tyre rolling radius as the pressure drops. The ABS brake sensors detect that one wheel is rotating faster than the other three: ergo a leaking tyre.

That’s fine on bitumen roads, but isn’t always accurate on rough gravel roads or bush tracks, where wheels can slip and spin.  A better system is one that reads pressure and temperature in each tyre and transmits that information to a display inside the vehicle.

The best of these uses a transmitter, mounted on a metal strap around the wheel rim, inside the tyre. Another type has a transmitter on the inside of the valve stem, but this is easily damaged during tyre removal.

The easiest one to fit is one where the transmitter screws onto the valve stem, but this type isn’t as accurate at measuring tyre temperature and is also open to theft.

RECOVERY POINTS

“One day you’re gonna get caught!” is how the ad for blokes’ jocks used to run and the same is true of off-roading: “One day you’re gonna get bogged”. It happens to all of us, sooner or later and at that point you’ll need outside help, unless you can winch yourself clear, which is a topic we’ll cover elsewhere.

When you’re travelling with another vehicle or two the easiest way to get out of a bogging – dry or wet – is with a short tow or ‘snatch’ from another 4WD. This is not really the ideal time to discover that your 4WD has no suitable recovery points.

The thin brackets used for securing the vehicle in transit on a ship or car carrier aren’t strong enough for recovery work and neither are the screw-in towing eyes that are part of many modern 4WDs’ tool kits.

If you have a properly designed and fitted ’roo bar it usually comes with two strong recovery points built-in. Another possibility is that a cast hook is bolted to one of the chassis rails, under the bar.

A sturdy tow bar can double as a rear recovery point, but not by using the tow ball. The best type is one with a square tongue socket and locking cross pin that can secure a tow rope or snatch strap eye.

If your vehicle doesn’t have bar work it needs strong, recovery hooks bolted to the chassis or major body members front and rear.