Few places are as challenging to traverse as Antarctica, Earth’s most inhospitable continent. The vast, windswept landscape varies from hard ice to deep snow, with just a few rocky beaches. Fields of jagged ice – starmukha – hide gaping crevasses, some over a hundred feet deep and wide enough to swallow a vehicle. Powdery snow traps vehicles and diminishes mobility. Towering sastrugis, jagged, wind-eroded snow formations, block passage, as do massive walls of ice formed by pressure ridges. Violent blizzards can trap an exploration party for weeks.
Antarctica is a bizarre, disorienting land. At the pole, a 6-month day (October-March, with two months of straight daylight) is followed by a 6-month night (April-September, with two months in total darkness) until the sun rises from the North. Aurora Australis eerily illuminates the night sky. Mirages, sundogs, and whiteouts afflict visitors’ vision. Distances and proportions are hard to judge in the pristine atmosphere and featureless plains. Frostbite is a constant risk.
Antarctica is the coldest place on Earth, cold enough to freeze conventional fuels and harden tires, with a summer average temperature of -18°F / -28°C and winter average of -76°F / -60°C (the coldest temperature recorded is an unendurable -128.6°F / -89.2°C at the Soviet Union’s Vostok station, in July 1983). The Antarctic plateau’s average elevation is 9,800 feet / 3,000 meters above sea level, where low oxygen and subzero temperatures cripple vehicles and cause altitude sickness. It’s also bone dry. The humidity precipitates into snow in the extreme cold, making Antarctica the world’s largest desert, drier than the Sahara.
The continent is covered by a 1-2 ½ mile / 2-4 kilometer thick ice cap. Reaching the geographic South Pole requires traversing the steep cliffs of the Ross Ice Barrier to a plateau the size of Australia, 10,000 feet / 3,000 meters above sea level.
This inaccessible land has low biodiversity, zero infrastructure, and no permanent human residents. It wasn’t even recognized as a continent until explorations by France, England, and the US in the 1840s. A stout vehicle is needed to traverse this unforgiving landscape. The Toyota Hilux, often heavily modified, is up to the task.
Getting Around Antarctica: A Brief History
Antarctic transportation evolved long before the first Toyota Hilux arrived. Landfall was first recorded in 1895 by seven members of a Norwegian fishing vessel, including amateur explorer Carsten Borchgrevink. Borchgrevink returned with a team in February 1899 and made the first year-long Antarctic scientific expedition, returning to civilization in January 1900. The exploration party brought seventy-two sled dogs with them for hauling supplies, the first transport deployed in Antarctica. Dog sledding originated in the Arctic, invented by the Indigenous Inuits at least 9,500 years ago. Teams of sled dogs, adapted for strenuous pulling, can haul substantial loads over dozens of miles a day. Huskies and muscle were the primary means of transporting supplies until the refinement of the Eliason motor sledge in the 1940’s, the precursor to today’s snowmobile.
The Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, from 1879 to 1922, was an age marked by a scientific zeal, nationalistic fervor, and a quest for adventure. It was a time when survival technology for extreme conditions was nascent, and exploration was conducted under perilous conditions with limited resources. For the corporations, governments, and militaries that sponsored Antarctic exploration, national prestige, geopolitical influence, scientific research, and economic potential (from whaling and sealing) was at stake.
It was during this time that the first motor vehicles for Antarctic conditions were designed. Pack animals and manpower could take explorers only so far. The challenging logistics of feeding and caring for dogs and horses in the desolate environment limited the range of early expeditions.
The Arol-Johnson Motor Car
The first motor vehicle on the continent was a part of legendary explorer Ernest Shackleton’s 1907-1909 Nimrod expedition to the Antarctic. Few figures capture the imagination like Ernest Shackleton. His three Antarctic expeditions stand as a testament to human resilience and leadership against all odds. Based on his prior Antarctic experience as a member of Robert Scott’s early Discovery expedition, Shackleton saw the potential of motorized transport to reach the South Pole.
The Scottish-made Arol-Johnston motor car, donated by company owner and expedition sponsor William Beardmore, was custom designed for the undertaking. The open-cab two-seater was powered by a 4-cylinder, 12 to 15 horsepower, air cooled engine. Alcohol fueled the vehicle (diesel gums up at 32°F / 0°C), and custom lubricants were formulated to remain effective below zero. Wooden, steel-spiked tires were designed for traction over snow and ice, and optional front ski attachments could be installed if demanded by the terrain. The effectiveness of this design was mixed. The Arrol-Johnson could make 6 miles per hour / 9.7 kilometers per hour over hard ice, but the narrow wheels of the heavy vehicle sank in snow. Overheating plagued the engine. Nevertheless, the car was used to establish supply depots for excursions to the pole. Given the rudimentary state of automotive technology (Ford wouldn’t start mass producing automobiles until 1908), and the inability to test for Antarctica’s unrelenting conditions, the Arrol-Johnson proved the potential of motoring over the South Pole.Custom Antarctic vehicles were again tried in 1910 by Englishman Robert Falcon Scott, the time for the legendary neck-and-neck race to first reach the South Pole between Captain Scott and Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. On Scott’s first Discovery expedition of 1901-1904, the crew complement of officers, scientists, and seamen were accompanied by a team of nineteen dogs to haul supplies and equipment for scientific surveys and an attempt for the Pole. Seven dogs survived the expedition after the scurvy-ravaged three-man expedition team turned back about 530 miles / 850 kilometers from their goal. The lessons learned from the Discovery expedition informed the strategy of Scott’s following Terra Nova expedition in 1910-1913, including the deployment of motorized vehicles.
The Wolseley Motor Sledge
Three caterpillar-tracked motor sledges (one was lost during unloading, falling through thin ice over Erebus Bay), thirty-three dogs, and nineteen Siberian horses accompanied the Terra Nova expedition, with the expectation that the tractors would outperform the dogs and horses. Based on a design patented in 1908 by Belton Hamilton, each motor sledge was approximately 10 feet / 3 meters long, 6 ½ feet / 2 meters wide and 5 feet / 1 ½ meters high. Treads, a new technology patented in 1907, replaced wheels. Only later, in WWI, would treads be applied to tanks to slog across the cratered no-man’s lands between battleground trenches. The sledges appear simple: Two spiked tank treads supported by a metal-clad wooden frame, with a center-positioned engine under a boxy cowling, two steering levers, a front toolbox, and a rear driver’s seat atop the fuel tank. Spring suspension kept the engine and driver more or less free of damaging vibrations. An air-cooled gasoline engine managed 1 ¾ miles per hour / 2.8 kilometers per hour in low gear and 3 ½ miles per hour / 5.6 kilometers per hour in top gear and could crest a gradient of about 25 degrees. The two-gear transmission had no reverse, and the sledge was not equipped with brakes, but the transmission could be detached from the engine for coasting downhill or stopping without shutting down. Built by the Wolseley Tool and Motor Car Company at the start of 1909, each could haul up to 6,720 pounds / 3,000 kilograms and were intended to transport tons of supplies for the duration of the expedition.
After a promising start, the remorseless Antarctic took a toll on the two surviving machines. By November 1911, both were permanently out of commission. Like the Arrol-Johnson motor car from Shackleton’s prior Nimrod expedition, the sledges seized up in the cold. Not fully assessed in Antarctic conditions before being deployed, the specially formulated cold temperature lubricants still froze. Inadequate air cooling broke cylinders, and there weren’t enough spares for repair. Ultimately, the sledges traveled less than 140 miles / 225 kilometers combined before being abandoned. With no experienced mushers on the team, the dogs were sent back to base camp. The Siberian horses froze to death 310 miles / 500 kilometers inland. Supplies would be pulled by men for the rest of the way. A five-man assault team, including Captain Scott, reached the pole on January 17, 1911, greeted by a tent and Norwegian flag erected by explorer Roald Amundsen’s team just weeks earlier. None from Scott’s defeated and dispirited company returned, dying of exposure and starvation on the trek back to basecamp.
In contrast, renowned Norwegian Arctic explorer Roald Amundsen, racing to reach the pole before Scott, brought no experimental vehicles, just fifty-six huskies and experienced dog handlers. Amundsen and his team set out from camp on October 20, 1911 with forty-six dogs pulling four sledges. As planned, the exploration party ate the dogs as they progressed. Eighteen huskies survived the round trip. Amundsen’s team was the first to reach the geographic South Pole on December 14, 1911 with no casualties.
Motorized Antarctic transport finally proved its worth on Sir Edmund Hillary’s 1958 Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, which reached the Pole with three modified Ferguson TE-20 agricultural tractors.
Today, our presence on the continent is prescribed by the Antarctic Treaty of 1959, which bans military activity and establishes that all Antarctic science is shared. Dogs, horses, and other non-indigenous animals are now forbidden. In the 2020’s, twenty-one nations operated permanent Antarctic research stations, many with generations of stations in service since the late 1940’s. It’s in this open-air Antarctic laboratory that the Toyota Hilux has found its niche on the continent.