Yikes. I just read that article and it’s like the most extreme form of someone being obsessed with the idea of an experience but never having done any version of it. He claims to want to show his daughter the world, but there are way easier ways to do that than building this monstrosity. The places he lists that he wants to take her (California and Canada) hardly require a 52,000 lb, six-wheel drive tractor trailer. How about a plane ticket and a rental car? If you want to go off road for a day, rent a Jeep. For other places in the world, he describes them as “too dangerous” for his daughter. He describes adding the motorcycle in case his daughter has a medical emergency, which is guaranteed to be worse than calling 911 anywhere in Canada or California.
This guy has a kind of neurosis that you see sometimes with technology-obsessed people from white collar backgrounds who haven’t actually done very much in the world. I had a lot of coworkers like this guy, but without the infinite money to act on the feelings. People who want to do things, but think they need enormous layers of technology and “protection” to do it. I’ve never seen it manifested at quite this extreme before, but it’s frankly a little disturbing.
Also, any truck that complicated is going to break down in the first bit of real adversity it encounters, and he’ll be mighty glad for all the locals in whatever village in Africa he gets stuck near who have first gen Land Rovers to bring him to a hotel.
I wish guys like this would admit that this enterprise is about them and their love of gadgets for gadget’s sake. This has nothing to do with his daughter and what’s best for her.
He wishes that he could brag about breaking down in a remote village in Africa. I found a more recent article on it that includes this passage:
Also, that monstrosity only sleeps 3 people. Which is one more person than the tiny teardrop trailer that I built for like $1000 and have traveled thousands of miles with.
Wow, amazing. Completely predictable to anyone who has experience building things for the real world (and then doing those things), but amazing nonetheless.
Complexity is always the dead giveaway that homebrew designs are coming from people with little life experience. One of the first things you learn when actually going off road, going long distances, going to remote places, or even digging a basement, is that simplicity is the key to reliability and reliability has to be the most important criteria.
At the risk of getting a little Old Lady Yelling At Clouds here, even the word “overlander” bugs me. Back in the 1970s, our family had a Blazer and later a Hilux that we used to camp all over different types of wilderness. It was just “4x4 camping” back then, a subset of backcountry camping. As soon this very old hobby got codified as “overlanding” with specialized vehicles for the purpose, I feel like all the douchery suddenly appeared.
When we were stuck in a glacier runoff in that Blazer and had to open the doors and let the water run through to keep the truck from getting washed downstream while our friends got their winch set, we didn’t call it “overlanding”. It was just…. a fun weekend.
I also thought his obsession with “keeping his daughter completely safe” was a little disturbing. Among other things the vehicle has 22 exterior cameras for “security.” How is his daughter ever supposed to learn confidence and self-sufficiency if she’s being taught that she needs a high-tech war-rig just to go on a camping trip? Hopefully, in spite of her father, she’ll learn that she doesn’t need to live her life in constant fear.
Soooo much this. The same people who think something like this is needed to travel or camp are the same people who are so terrified of their fellow human beings that we have to hope they never get put on charge of anything important.
There’s also the constant emphasis on “self-sufficiency” in these things. The best way to be “self-sufficient” is to ask people around you for help when you need it. People help each other! It’s what we do! It’s how we’ve made it to this point.
My kids step-dad converted a van (Wanna say a Ford Transit, but I could be wrong) to a camper van that sleeps 3. He did a lot of custom work, ripping out and putting in stuff in the interior, and added windows to the exterior and some solar panels, IIRC. Way cheaper, simpler, and they have actually gone camping with it. Ended up coating the whole thing in bed liner, which was an odd choice IMO, but I guess it is durable.
A network is always stronger than an individual. That is why a lot of rural communities are fairly tight knit, because everyone has helped someone else through “6 degrees of separation”, and so if you need to do XYZ you know that Bob down the road knows how to do that.
IMO, how to instill this in kids is to let them DO things. They want to read early? Teach them. They want to make their own food, show them and let them. They want to build something, give them some wood, a saw, and some nails and hammers. Don’t micromanage and make it YOUR project. Let them do what they want and you interject when safety is an issue, or if they ask for help on how to do something. In some cases it might be “making them” do self sufficient chores vs doing everything for them. But then you don’t end up with a 19 year old at college who doesn’t know how to wash clothes.
100%. It’s very telling at the end of that Wired article when it says the guy never spends any time with his daughter because he’s working on the truck, and when asked if she’s excited about the truck, the daughter shrugs and wanders off. This guy is going to deeply regret not spending that time with his daughter doing whatever she wants to do. You can’t get time with your kids back. Squandering it like this is tragic.
The whole claim that he was building it for her was clearly a lie to help drive news coverage because he started the project before she was born in 2009 (I saw it, or an earlier version of it, when I interviewed at Applied Minds in 2005 or so) and at least as of the linked article from 2020 he still hadn’t actually taken it out on a real trip yet.
I should probably try to get back on topic after this massive derail though. Here’s some time capsule related news:
