The Indestructible Toyota Hilux: Top Gear Tried to Kill a Pickup

Most car reviews ask whether a vehicle is good. In late 2003, Top Gear asked a ruder question about a used Toyota Hilux: what does it take to kill one? The answer, across two episodes of series 3, turned out to be "more than a television programme has".

How it was supposed to die

The rules were simple and cruel. Jeremy Clarkson picked the truck up from a farmyard and promised no computer graphics and no mechanical alterations. After each assault, a mechanic was allowed to try to revive it, but only with basic tools and no spare parts.

Then the assaults began. Clarkson drove it through Bristol in a way that damaged his spine more than the truck. He parked it on the shore of the Severn estuary, where the Hilux was tethered while the tide came in. The ropes snapped, the truck went missing, and it only reappeared five hours later when the water went out, its cylinders full of seawater. Forty minutes of spanner work later, it started.

Back at the test track it was driven through the Top Gear production office, had a caravan dropped on it, was hit with a wrecking ball and was set on fire. The team admitted the only part they replaced was the windscreen, swapped for Perspex so the office stunt wouldn't take his head off.

The tower block

In the next episode James May took over, because the team decided they'd been thinking laterally when they should have been thinking vertically. The Hilux was placed on the roof of a 23-storey tower block in Hackney, east London, that was due to be demolished, 240 feet up. May bet a tenner that nobody would drive it away.

May lost the bet. The truck came down with the building, the mechanic reconnected the battery and added some diesel, and it drove. The chassis was split right across, to the point where the bodywork was holding it together, which is the opposite of how trucks are supposed to work. The presenters decided to stop trying and give it a plinth instead.

What went wrong

Nothing, and that was the problem. The challenge was designed to end with a dead truck and ended with a legend, which every pickup advert since has quietly envied.

The weirdest bit

The Hilux's "repair" after a tower-block demolition was a battery reconnection and some fuel. It's the only car in this garage whose bad idea belonged entirely to the people around it.

The truck did get its plinth, more or less: the Grampian Transport Museum in Alford, Aberdeenshire, lists it as part of its own collection.

Where is it now?

The Indestructible Toyota Hilux

In a museumAs of November 2026

Grampian Transport Museum, Alford, Aberdeenshire, Scotland. The museum lists it in the Grampian Transport Museum Collection with its current location as 'On display'. Its Top Gear exhibition, And On That Bombshell, ran until 25 October 2026, and the museum closes every year from November to March, so check before you travel.

Source: Grampian Transport Museum: Indestructible Toyota Hilux

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