Put your helmets on, fill those tanks with homemade napalm and click "next" because the cities are exploding and you need to know how to survive the upheaval.

Vehicle: EM-50 Urban Assault Vehicle
Suggested By: Racin_G37
Pros: Comfort, full armor, integrated communications and weapons center, drapes
Cons: Maneuverability, fictional
Best Suited For: Sneaking a large force into an urban area in the Sun Belt where people expect to see RVs. Come on guys, we're taking over Phoenix tonight!

Vehicle: Matte Black Bicycle
Suggested By: Alfisted
Pros: Quick, easy to carry, stealth
Cons: Lack of armor, storage, speed
Best Suited For: Densely packed urban slums like Rio (ready for an Olympic rumble).

Vehicle: Deuce And A Half/M35
Suggested By: Ryan K. Light
Pros: Will run on nearly every burning fluid, powerful, gigantic
Cons: Too big for small alleys, slow, hard to defend without a roof
Best Suited For: A metropolis with a lot of freeways and high-proof liquor to run the engine on, like Los Angeles or Moscow.

Vehicle: Killdozer
Suggested By: Evil-Jeremy
Pros: Nearly unstoppable, great name, armored, can crush opponents
Cons: Poor fuel economy, space, no exit
Best Suited For: Crazed suicide mission urban warfare when you expect to go up against a lot of pedestrians (Copenhagen)

Vehicle: V8 Interceptor
Suggested By: Snapoversteer
Pros: Proven, fierce looking, fast, Mel Gibson-approved
Cons: Sucks down fuel, poor visibility
Best Suited For: Lawless, abandoned urban towns like Detroit.

Vehicle: EarthRoamer XV-LT
Suggested By: EBone
Pros: Tough, decent mileage, ISO9001 compliant protection against chemical, biological and nuclear contamination
Cons: Big, harder to fix, you're not going to need those satellite dishes when the satellites crash into the cities
Best Suited For: When society breaks down and the armies of the world release all their weapons and it's a mutant/zombie urban throw-down you'll be able to live comfortably in Omaha.

Vehicle: Tumbler
Suggested By: Robbloeb
Pros: Batman-approved, designed for dense urban areas, armed and armored
Cons: Experimental, hard to repair, complex
Best Suited For: quick jaunts of intense urban warfare when you have a subway/dungeon/cave to retreat to when done causing mischief, like Chicago or NYC.

Vehicle: Toyota 4x4
Suggested By: Schm
Pros: Tough, cheap to maintain, can carry your warlord buddies
Cons: Little armor, easy to tipover
Best Suited For: Crowded, dilapidated cities with crappy roads like Mogadishu.

Vehicle: Mazda 323 GTX
Suggested By: 2trips
Pros: Good all weather traction, super tuneable, easy to repair
Cons: Lack of space, small, not at all bulletproof
Best Suited For: European cities like Barcelona with narrow streets, fruit carts and streets wet with blood.

Vehicle: Hamann Typhoon
Suggested By: Arcsine
Pros: G-Wagen toughness, V12 power (0-62 MPH in 5.1 seconds), stainless steel bits, looks ready for battle
Cons: Flashy, uses tons of gas, weakness in the wheels
Best Suited For: any city with open roads and a lot of fuel around like Riyadh or Houston.

Thanks to Myke Toman, Nick Pon, Zerin Dube and Speed:Sport:Life, Anna C of Bikini Racer, the Norwegian Slaabs, Saabs Gone Wild, Prison Break Racing, Team Beermer, LeMons Supreme Court Justice Lieberman, Jackson Williams, and others for their fine photographs.

Today I am going to honor this little truck (which I've been borrowing to haul engines and sheets of plywood since the early '90s; it's always wise to encourage your sister to marry a Toyota truck owner) by posing it at the former Alameda Naval Air Station and giving it the DOTS treatment. This is the truck mentioned in the Orange Mix Tape post.


My brother-in-law (let's call him BIL for short) bought this truck new in Los Angeles in 1987, and ordered it in the most stripped-down, un-optioned form possible. No bumpers. No radio. No A/C. 4-speed transmission. You don't need frills when you've got the Warlord Grade 22R engine under the hood!


Unlike your typical Toyota-driving warlord, however, BIL has maintained his truck with obsessive care. Oh, sure, the body and interior are beat to crap (which is to be expected when a vehicle spends most of its life living in L.A., San Francisco,and Oakland), but every single mechanical maintenance item has been carried out on the dot. You're looking at the single major failed component of this truck's 240,000-mile lifetime in the photo above: the master cylinder went bad about 5 years back. Other than that, only normal wear items such as brake pads, catalytic converter, etc., have been replaced. The original clutch is still working fine. Even by Toyota standards, we're talking absurd reliability here.


Which isn't to say it hasn't needed some electrical work over the years, because it has been stolen once, had its ignition punched four times during attempted thefts, and had the dash torn open by stereo thieves more times than there are AK-47s in an Afghani Hilux. Ah, street parking in the big city.


The current sound system is a Pick Your Part Half Price Sale special setup, with a mid-80s Subaru radio mounted in a crude plywood faceplate that seems to be pretty good at convincing thieves that they should move on the the single-disc CD player in the Mitsubishi Cordia parked down the street.

We've got an '85 4WD Toyota pickup with just 25,000 miles on the clock, no rust, and a freshly rebuilt 22R (which must be a record for the fewest number of miles prior to a rebuild on any Toyota R engine in history). We can't manage to slog all the way through the CAPS LOCK-enhanced, red-and-blue-text description (which features such brain-scramblers as "HE HAVES OVER $8,000 WIYH THE MECHANICAL WORK"), but you can tell this truck is pretty damn nice from the photographs. It failed to sell with a $6,000 Buy It Now; in fact, nobody even tried to meet the $1,000 starting bid price. Nice Price? Crack Pipe? You decide!
[eBay Motors, thanks to Parrish for the tip]

Largely unchanged mechanically, the 2009 model retains the same 2.5-liter diesel engine generating 102 HP and 192 lb-ft of torque. While that might not sound like enough to power two dozen subwoofers, a DVD player, hydraulic suspension and A/C simultaneously, that's not as important for Malaysians, who actually use their trucks for tasks like hauling manure and bringing produce to market (often simultaneously if the durian fruit is anything to go by). Outside, the Hilux gets indicators integrated into the wing mirrors, a new bumper and a revised grille. While such minor changes might challenge the fragile masculinity of US market truck buyers, they should be enough to keep one of the most reliable, practical trucks ever made moving forward off showroom floors. [Toyota Malaysia via Paultan]

Give it a coat of camouflage paint, install a water-cooled Vickers machine gun on a crude mount in the bed, and fill all available space with jungle/desert/mountain/urban fighters and maybe some looted livestock, and you'll see the Hilux in its natural element. It also looks good with a nice shiny paint job, parked in the battle-free East End of Alameda. In fact, this may be the cleanest 25-year-old Toyota truck I've ever seen; most others around here have seen 800,000 miles of hard use hauling plumbing supplies and drywall.


When you've got a Warlord Duty 22R under the hood, the hundreds of thousands of miles just fly right by. There's a much rougher '83 parked a few blocks from this truck, so residents of this neighborhood have the opportunity to see before-and-after examples of this legendary truck.