Land of the Giants! Driving the Ultimate 30,000-Pound Overland Vehicle
If you're looking for the ultimate in overlanding vehicles, the colossal Torsus Praetorian is where you’d start.
For a moment, I hang there, cantilevered over the abyss. Then I feel the front wheels roll over the edge, and the view through the windshield transitions from open sky to muddy earth in one smooth wipe. Somewhere under the floor comes the basso growl from 6.9 liters of diesel engine. It works with low-range gearing, diff-locks, and massive Michelin off-road tires to prevent this nearly 30,000-pound giant from running away down the 30-degree slope. Oh yes, off-roading in the Torsus Praetorian is like nothing else.
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That’s because the Torsus Praetorian is an off-roader like nothing else, a behemoth of a box on wheels that measures 28.6 feet long, 8.4 feet wide, and a towering 12.6 feet tall, with a wheelbase that’s as long as a two-door Jeep Wrangler from bumper to bumper. Designed and engineered in the Czech Republic, underpinned by German truck hardware, and built in Slovakia, the Torsus Praetorian has been designed as a bus or cargo carrier for use in open-cut mines or on safaris far from the highway. It can also be converted into the world’s most off-road-capable RV.
And it is impressively capable off-road. Torsus says the Praetorian will climb a 33-degree incline and traverse a 33.5-degree slope. It will wade through water 27 inches deep, it has a 28-degree approach angle, a 22-degree departure angle, and a 41-degree breakover angle. And it rolls on 365/80R20 Michelin XZL tires that are 43 inches tall. Yes, you need a lot of room to maneuver this thing around, but on one section of our drive, the Praetorian easily traversed a series of deep concrete half pipes angled across the trail that would probably have stopped a stock Wrangler Rubicon in its tracks.
MAN Truck Underneath, Torsus on Top
The Praetorian is based on MAN truck hardware. Now owned by Volkswagen Group and primarily focused on truck and bus production, MAN has a history of heavy-duty engineering expertise that dates to its beginnings in ironmaking in Germany’s Ruhr Valley in 1758. Along the way it has, among other things, built bridges and printing presses and armored fighting vehicles and powertrains for submarines. Between 1893 and 1897, MAN’s general director, Heinrich von Buz, gave engineer Rudolph Diesel the time and resources to develop the compression-ignition combustion engine that would bear his name. MAN has been building diesel engines ever since.
Each of the six cylinders of the MAN D0836 diesel that powers the Torsus Praetorian displaces 1.15 liters, and you can feel the reciprocation of the masses in the loping low-speed idle. A baby among six-cylinder MAN truck engines (its burly cousin, the D3876, displaces a whopping 15.3 liters), the D0836 develops a relatively modest 285 hp at 2,200 rpm, but a stout 848 lb-ft of torque from 1,200 rpm to 1,750 rpm. The engine redlines at 3,000 rpm, and the Praetorian is speed-limited to 65 mph. For something as big and tall and heavy as this, that’s plenty fast enough.
The engine sits up in the front end of a MAN TGM truck chassis and drives all four wheels via a MAN TipMatic 12-speed automated manual transmission and a MAN G102 two-speed transfer case that delivers a 1.6 reduction in low range. The front and rear beam axles are MAN units with a planetary reduction drive and diff locks. The front axle is leaf-sprung, while the rear has electronically controlled air springs to maintain an even ride height and improve body control when the Praetorian is carrying its full 7,700-pound payload.
It might be a truck chassis, but trucks these days are anything but crude and simple. The Praetorian comes standard with four-wheel disc brakes overseen by antilock and electronic brake force distribution systems, as well as stability control, traction control, and lane detection systems. Sitting atop the chassis, located by a series of rubber blocks to reduce noise, vibration, and harshness, is a body designed and constructed by Torsus that comprises polymer panels mounted on a steel frame.
The Praetorian I’m driving is the bus version. There are doors on either side of the cockpit and a single power door halfway along the right side, all with power steps to make entry and exit easier in a vehicle whose floor is about 4.5 feet above the ground. The standard configuration accommodates 34 passengers plus one alongside the driver. A 32+1-passenger version with more legroom is also available.
But the Praetorian can also be ordered as an empty shell, which allows customers to configure it as a cargo carrier or as a luxury RV with all the modern conveniences, including four berths, a self-contained bathroom, and a fully equipped kitchen. It’s like a small house you can take overlanding. Which makes the Torsus Praetorian a little intimidating to drive at first, regardless of whether you’re an experienced off-roader or Class A motorhome pilot.
I climb aboard and settle into the driver’s seat behind a steering wheel and dash from MAN’s TGM-series cab-over trucks. The driving position is upright, with the steering wheel angled upward, the steering column running down between my legs to the floor. The gas and brake pedals are located to the right of the steering column. No left foot braking here, then.
Gear selection is by way of a multifunction stalk on the right side of the steering column. It’s not a simple lever: Twisting the wings at the end of the stalk forward engages drive, rearward reverse. Neutral is engaged by pushing a section of the stalk inwards. A button on the end of the stalk switches the 12-speed transmission between automatic and manual modes, the latter of which allows upshifts by pulling the lever toward you and downshifts by pushing it away. Low range is engaged by switching from the road-oriented Efficiency mode through Off-Road mode, which recalibrates the drivetrain for gravel and mud, and into Low Range mode. The center, rear, and front diffs can all be locked in tough terrain.
Driving the Torsus Is One Colossal Task
As we’re about to negotiate the off-road course at the old General Motors Millbrook proving ground north of London, my minder suggests manual mode, first gear, and low range, with all three diffs locked. And, he says, get some momentum up before pulling on the multifunction stalk to engage second gear. I quickly learn why: In the eternity it takes for the MAN TipMatic to muscle the transmission’s industrial-strength gearset around, the Praetorian slows, stops, and then starts rolling back down the slight hill. I punch the brake pedal. My minder smiles. “Yes, it takes its time,” he says of the shift protocol, “especially at low speeds. We need to be going a little faster.”
I get it right next time and settle into the task of guiding this monster over lumps and bumps, up and down steep climbs, and through flooded gullies. I’ve driven cab-over trucks and semis over the years, but the last cab-over vehicle I drove off-road was Mitsubishi L300 4x4 van back in the 1980s, and I remember having to recalibrate my brain in terms of understanding where my backside was in terms of its center of gravity and pivot point when deciding which line to pick through the rough stuff. It was much the same driving the Torsus Praetorian, though the calculus involved this time was on a much more epic scale.
Given that its front wheels are located behind the driver, you must remember to drive well past the normal turn-in point before you start to swing on the giant steering wheel. Then you watch in the equally giant mirrors to make sure the midsection doesn’t clip obstacles on the inside of the turn and the tail doesn’t clout anything on the outside of the turn as the giant Torsus changes direction with the studied determination of an aircraft carrier. But once you become more familiar with its size and mass, and its ability to traverse terrain that would stop all but the most seriously off-road capable SUVs, the Torsus Praetorian is laugh-out-loud fun to drive. Driving it off-road for the first time is one of those “I can’t believe I’m actually doing this” moments, like driving a Porsche 911 GT3 on ice.
Size aside, the trickiest part of driving the Torsus Praetorian off-road is dealing with the ultra-slow shifts of its 12-speed transmission. On the road, where momentum covers a multitude of sins, the transmission’s lethargy is manageable—and the Praetorian comes with an Emergency mode setting that allows for faster gearchanges at higher road speeds to aid first responders in a hurry. But when you’re crawling in low range, you need to be anticipating the gear you need for the terrain ahead well in advance to ensure the Praetorian doesn’t come to a halt at precisely the wrong time, forcing you to perhaps deploy the 98-foot-long cable from the optional 26,500-pound-capacity winch under the front bumper.
The other tricky bit is using the hill descent control: Unless you breathe on the brake pedal just before you nose the big beast down a steep hill, it takes a couple of seconds for the system to kick in, by which time it's rapidly accelerating downhill.
Want One? Not for the U.S.—Yet.
Whether built as a bus, a load lugger, or an RV, the Torsus Praetorian is not for the unadventurous. Nor is it for the impecunious: Praetorian prices in Europe start at the equivalent of about $250,000, with an RV version costing considerably more once you factor in the price of the third-party outfitting. Filling the 80-gallon fuel tank with diesel would cost you almost $300 a time here in the States, and you’d need to spend more than $60 to top up the nine-gallon Ad-Blue tank. (The big MAN D0836 diesel meets the latest and toughest Euro 6 emissions regulations.) Those giant Michelin XZL tires will set you back about $2,000 apiece.
But the folks at Torsus say they’ve had strong interest in the Praetorian from potential customers in the U.S. who want the ultimate overlanding RV. As a result, Torsus is working to see whether it can get the vehicle homologated for sale stateside.
I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t fascinated by cars. My father was a mechanic, and some of my earliest memories are of handing him wrenches as he worked to turn a succession of down-at-heel secondhand cars into reliable family transportation. Later, when I was about 12, I’d be allowed to back the Valiant station wagon out onto the street and drive it around to the front of the house to wash it. We had the cleanest Valiant in the world.
I got my driver’s license exactly three months after my 16th birthday in a Series II Land Rover, ex-Australian Army with no synchro on first or second and about a million miles on the clock. “Pass your test in that,” said Dad, “and you’ll be able to drive anything.” He was right. Nearly four decades later I’ve driven everything from a Bugatti Veyron to a Volvo 18-wheeler, on roads and tracks all over the world. Very few people get the opportunity to parlay their passion into a career. I’m one of those fortunate few.
I started editing my local car club magazine, partly because no-one else would do it, and partly because I’d sold my rally car to get the deposit for my first house, and wanted to stay involved in the sport. Then one day someone handed me a free local sports paper and said they might want car stuff in it. I rang the editor and to my surprise she said yes. There was no pay, but I did get press passes, which meant I got into the races for free. And meet real automotive journalists in the pressroom. And watch and learn.
It’s been a helluva ride ever since. I’ve written about everything from Formula 1 to Sprint Car racing; from new cars and trucks to wild street machines and multi-million dollar classics; from global industry trends to secondhand car dealers. I’ve done automotive TV shows and radio shows, and helped create automotive websites, iMags and mobile apps. I’ve been the editor-in-chief of leading automotive media brands in Australia, Great Britain, and the United States. And I’ve enjoyed every minute of it. The longer I’m in this business the more astonished I am these fiendishly complicated devices we call automobiles get made at all, and how accomplished they have become at doing what they’re designed to do. I believe all new cars should be great, and I’m disappointed when they’re not. Over the years I’ve come to realize cars are the result of a complex interaction of people, politics and process, which is why they’re all different. And why they continue to fascinate me.Read More