AT Overland’s new Tacoma Habitat package looks like a really elegant solution for off-road camping comfort without the mass of a full-on RV.
The Prescott, Arizona-based company has been turning trucks and Jeeps into adventure rigs for years. They also make livable trailers you can tow off-road. Their new Tacoma Habitat is the product of more than a year’s research on the best way to turn a popular pickup into a living space without sacrificing cargo capacity.
Habitat’s cap is just 340 pounds of aluminum with gas shocks to make almost instantaneous deployment of the poly/cotton canvas tent. That gives you plenty of payload capacity left over to load your truck full of beer, jerry cans, tools and other accessories you just can’t leave home without.
That tent folds out to be about 15 feet long, with the sleeping space extended out over the rear giving you 7 feet of headroom inside the truck bed while the tent is assembled. This interior shot will give you a better idea of what I mean:
Putting all of you and your slumber buddy’s weight out over nothing might look a little sketchy, but Mario over at AT Overland assured me the setup is extremely stable.
“We had two of us doing pull-ups off the back of that thing,” he told me over the phone. “It’s totally solid.” Mario also told me the shell cab was extremely strong with the tent tucked in. A honeycomb base of supportive materials dissipates weight. “Three of us could stand on top of it [with the tent down] with now bowing at all.”
AT Overland is going to start taking orders on a “first-come, first served” basis March 15th and will take one to two weeks to get your habitat built after that. Until they rack up a waiting list, of course.
So far the Tacoma Habitat is only available for second-gen (2005 to 2015) model year trucks with 5-foot and 6-foot beds, but AT Overland will be looking to see how easily they can adapt the shape to other pickups with similarly-sized cargo areas.
Pricing will be released March 1st, but don’t expect a “budget” solution. AT Overland sells a similar (though slightly more involved) setup for the four-door Jeep Wrangler already and the price for that starts at around $10,000.
You can read more specifics and specifications on AT Overland’s product page.
Images via AT Overland
Contact the author at andrew@jalopnik.com.