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A Japanese take on butch Americana - cowboy boots optional

There are some off-road vehicles that are fine as far as they go, as long as where they go is not off-road. Then there are the off-road vehicles that suffer the opposite problem. They don't really make much sense on-road. The Isuzu Rodeo Denver Max LE is a certain contender for the latter category.

In the first instance, it doesn't look appropriate in a road setting. Not, at least, a road setting with pavements, buildings and pedestrians. It may work in a road setting with, say, nothing but two-lane blacktop cutting through a huge vista of tumbleweed, mesas and buttes stretching as far as the eye can see. But there's not a lot of that round my way.

So, instead, the Rodeo Denver sat in my suburban street, as inconspicuous as Clint Eastwood with a shotgun at a pilates class. I wasn't sure what to do with it. Obviously, driving it was out of the question. Where would I go? Where would I park? How would I park?

These were the questions I pondered as I checked out the double cab arrangement. The back cabin, which works as a large boot, can be disassembled so that it's an open-back pick-up truck in which you could load manure or, sheet, anything you goddamn want.

Actually, despite its name, and an appearance that suggests a good ol' boy just stepped from its cabin in his cowboy boots, the one place you can't buy a Rodeo Denver is in the US, where this Japanese take on butch Americana is not on sale. That makes a kind of sense: good ol' boys are not renowned for their enthusiasm for foreign cars.

Anyway, after a couple of days of looking at the thing, I drove it to Cambridge. I was tempted to forgo the whole dreary motorway network and off-road across forest, stream and farmland, but in the dry weather, there was no mud challenge, so I took the M11. Seldom, outside a bedroom context, have I felt so potently heterosexual as when flooring the Max to the max on the motorway. Yee-hah! I'll say this in its favour, when those doggone middle-lane cruisers saw me in their rear-view mirrors, they got the hell out the way. But where's a country music radio station when you need one? Somehow, the Jeremy Vine Show didn't really fit the bill.

For such a large car, the navigation system screen couldn't have been smaller, and its faulty touch-screen facility demanded punching. Consequently arriving late in the car park of my destination, the only space carried an unwelcome notice: "Do not reverse into this space." Until you've tried to park a Rodeo Denver front-first in a tight space between two cars, with no back-up room, you can't really call yourself a cowboy.Isuzu Rodeo Denver Max LE

Price £24,059 (inc VAT)
Top speed 108mph
Acceleration 0-62 in 10.7 seconds
Average consumption 33.6mpg
CO2 emissions 222g/km
Eco rating 3/10
Bound for Way out west
In a word horsepowered
MotoringAndrew Anthony
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