HERE at Street Machine we’re all about going fast, burning rubber and making lots of noise. Drag racing, burnouts and the occasional blatt along a country road is our thing. So what would we be like at four-wheel driving, a sport that requires slow movements, careful inputs and a whole heap of patience? Yep, we were like fish out of water.

Over the Christmas holidays I was lent by the nice people at Ford their Everest SUV. It’s basically a Ranger pick-up underneath but with a wagon body on top and a coil-spring rear end. It still has a 3.2-litre turbodiesel five-cylinder motor, solid rear end and four-wheel drive with low-range mode – all the essentials for a decent off-road car.

So while I had a four-wheel drive I thought I might as well take it off road – in my area particularly, jacked-up Jeeps, Nissan Patrols and pick-ups have become extremely popular among youths, suggesting off-road driving might actually be quite popular. So I thought while I have a four-wheel drive I might as well try it out for myself. It would be a good test of the Everest – could two idiots with zero four-wheel driving experience go out into the bush for a day and survive without breaking anything?

While I had the Everest some people assumed this was the replacement for the locally-built Ford Territory SUV, but in terms of off-road ability a Territory wouldn’t stand a chance against the Everest – nor the terrain we ended up finding ourselves on.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

• The Trend 4×4 Automatic version we drove costs $62,990
• The 3.2-litre turbodiesel makes 143Kw and 470Nm
• Feels like a big, solid car on the road
• The lane-keep assistance will physically steer the car by itself to stay within the lane markings – great fun
• The stereo is absolutely awesome
• Heaps of space in the boot, but the back seat isn’t that big
• Pretty good off-road, even with no prior experience we made it through a pretty tricky track