The 2014 model year marks the final stand for Toyotaâs feisty FJ Cruiser sport/ute. Before it disappears
Category
🚗
MotorTranscript
00:00 Right here, nearly 70 years ago, the world as we know it changed forever.
00:10 Few people have ever been to this place, but today I've gained unprecedented access to explore alone,
00:20 to visit a site renowned both for staggering technological achievement and for unspeakable horror.
00:28 Because this is the original Ground Zero. This is Trinity.
00:38 I don't just write about adventure, I live it. Especially wringing out the coolest cars on the planet.
00:54 Let's see just how far these incredible machines can take us. Strap in for an epic drive.
01:02 Somebody brilliant invented the road trip. Probably somebody who, like me and you,
01:15 got fed up with deadlines and commitments and bills and just hit the road to get away from it all.
01:22 To shift one's horizon from desk edge to distant plain.
01:26 To roll on for hours without intercession of yield sign or stoplight.
01:31 To breathe air, dusty and thick, below sea level.
01:36 And thin air, fragrant with pine, through mountain passes topping 7,000 feet.
01:42 I'm headed to such a place, the American Southwest,
01:47 behind the wheel of the last of Toyota's feisty FJ Cruisers.
01:52 But first, sustenance.
01:55 Two hours southeast of Los Angeles, in the idyllic mountain village of Julian,
02:01 I stop for a slice of the area's world famous apple pie.
02:07 Well that was fabulous pie, but it's time to break in this FJ properly.
02:16 [music]
02:19 Now this is what I'm talking about. Glamis, baby. Imperial Sand Dunes.
02:43 Our own little Sahara Desert right here in southeastern California.
02:48 This is where the FJ Cruiser belongs.
02:51 [laughs]
02:53 Glad we got the new skid plates.
02:56 I gotta admit, when I first saw the FJ Cruiser concept hit the auto show circuit more than a decade ago,
03:04 I thought, you know, it's cute, but it kinda looks like it belongs on a Saturday morning cartoon, you know?
03:12 But by the time I drove a production vehicle in 2006,
03:16 I immediately took it out to my favorite off-road trails in Death Valley.
03:20 You know what? I'm a hardcore SUV guy.
03:24 I've owned Land Rovers, Jeep Wrangler. I like real rigs.
03:28 And this FJ? It's a real SUV. I was immediately impressed.
03:34 [music]
03:38 [engine revving]
03:41 This one is the 2014 FJ Cruiser Trail Team's ultimate edition.
03:55 Yeah, say that twice.
03:57 Toyota claims it's the hardest core FJ yet.
04:00 It's got a suspension developed by Toyota Racing Development, TRD.
04:04 Big Bilstein shocks front and rear.
04:07 It's got a quarter-inch aluminum skid plate up front.
04:11 And we're having a ball out here on Glamis, let me tell you.
04:15 [music]
04:18 Glamis Dunes to Yuma, Arizona is barely an hour of drive time.
04:28 But even on this short journey, I pass several inviting off-road playgrounds.
04:34 Finally, I can resist no longer and hit the dirt for a little exploring.
04:40 [music]
04:43 It's hard to describe the scale of the American Southwest unless you've been here.
04:50 It's just huge.
04:52 Here in the southwest corner of Arizona,
04:55 we're finding hundreds and hundreds of square miles of nothing.
04:59 Of course, when you've got a capable off-road rig like this FJ,
05:03 nothing suddenly becomes something.
05:06 As in, your own private sandbox.
05:10 The dry air of the southwest makes a perfect humidor for storing big things,
05:17 which helps explain the presence in Tucson, Arizona,
05:21 of one of the world's great aviation collections, the Pima Air and Space Museum.
05:27 Pima houses some amazing planes inside several huge hangars,
05:32 including this beautiful Martin PBM Mariner flying boat from World War II,
05:38 the only one left out of more than 1,300 built.
05:42 Nearby sits a glistening McDonnell Douglas F4E Phantom,
05:47 dressed up for its role with the U.S. Air Force's Thunderbirds flight team
05:52 during the early 1970s.
05:54 But it's outside where Pima's real prizes reside.
05:58 I get special permission to drive the FJ around the sprawling yard,
06:04 where I come across not one, but three massive B-52 Stratofortress bombers
06:10 lined up in a row.
06:12 Only one of three B-52A models built,
06:16 this one served at Edwards Air Force Base in the 1960s
06:20 as the mothership for the famous X-15 rocket plane.
06:25 It proudly bears paint markings for every test drop or powered rocket flight.
06:31 Nearby I find a Super Guppy, a huge, grotesquely modified Boeing,
06:38 this one used by NASA to carry massive pieces of the Saturn V rocket
06:44 that powered the Apollo Moon flights.
06:46 Oh yeah, it could swallow up the FJ, no problem.
06:51 One of my favorite ever airplanes, the Convair B-58 Hustler,
06:57 the world's first bomber capable of Mach 2.
07:01 What a wickedly beautiful piece of work.
07:04 You want to visit a great candy store, guys?
07:07 Then get thee to Pima.
07:09 I could spend hours here just taking in all the aging aluminum,
07:14 listening to those grand old wings talk.
07:18 Out here in the southwest desert, it's just empty, empty for miles and miles,
07:31 and then you come along to these little oases of cool hardware,
07:36 like the Pima Air Museum we just left that had all these great planes and helicopters.
07:41 Well, now we're heading toward the White Sands Missile Range,
07:44 which is another just vast, vast, almost incomprehensible piece of land
07:49 that has its own little collection of missiles from America's military past
07:54 that are still being tested there today.
07:56 We're going to have a look at what they've got on display there.
08:05 Today, a sprawling missile park showcases much of the tubular hardware
08:10 tested and perfected here, among them the Nike, the Patriot, and the Redstone.
08:18 From the late '50s to the early '60s,
08:23 18 of these Army Redstone missiles were test-fired out here at White Sands.
08:27 And, of course, most famously, in 1961, astronaut Alan Shepard
08:32 became the first American in space flying aboard a Redstone rocket.
08:36 After World War II, White Sands also became the testing site
08:40 for one of Germany's most notorious weapons, the V-2 rocket,
08:45 which for years had terrorized the city of London.
08:49 The U.S. military gathered up V-2 pieces in Europe, transported them to New Mexico,
08:55 and reassembled them here at White Sands for testing,
08:58 under the guidance of the V-2's creator himself, Werner von Braun,
09:04 who would later go on to mastermind America's moon rockets.
09:09 So how many rockets were actually turned back into operational status
09:13 here at White Sands and test-fired?
09:15 We ended up firing 67 of them from 1946 to 1952.
09:21 By that time, most of the parts had deteriorated, or we couldn't use them,
09:24 and American rocket technology was sort of coming into its own by then.
09:28 Okay, but you had the godfather of the rocket program himself, Werner von Braun,
09:33 who started the whole NASA rocket program, was part of this,
09:36 and he was here at White Sands too for a while.
09:38 Absolutely, absolutely. He came up--he was basically stationed at Fort Bliss,
09:42 and he would come up with about 30 of the German rocket team members
09:45 to work with the Army, Navy, and contractors here at White Sands.
09:49 Darren, when we think about the space shuttle landing,
09:51 it was Kennedy Space Center or Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert,
09:54 but it turns out the space shuttle landed here at White Sands once.
09:57 That's correct. In 1982, the weather in Florida was not good at all,
10:02 and the landing site at Edwards was flooded,
10:05 and so we were the third alternate landing site, so the space shuttle landed here.
10:09 So Columbia landed here in 1982.
10:11 Yes, sir.
10:12 Jack Lousma and Gordon Fullerton.
10:14 Correct.
10:15 Very cool.
10:18 It's in the northern range of White Sands, though,
10:21 where in 1945, America conducted the most monumental and world-changing test of them all.
10:30 [music]
10:46 It was here, in a small ranch house taken over by the government
10:50 during the so-called Manhattan Project,
10:53 that scientists and engineers, under the leadership of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer,
10:59 completed the final assembly of the world's first atomic bomb.
11:04 We're standing in the actual room, aren't we, where they assembled the first atomic bomb.
11:08 That's correct.
11:09 I just can't--there's a picture of some guys carrying the plutonium in from a car
11:13 out here in the middle of the desert.
11:16 It's just hard to get your mind around all that.
11:18 It certainly is.
11:19 I mean, just the way technology is today,
11:21 it's really hard to imagine that they used this type of room for a laboratory
11:25 to assemble a plutonium core to stick in the back of a truck
11:28 and drive down a dirt road two miles.
11:31 You know, 1945, that's just where they were.
11:35 I was looking through some of the pictures here inside the ranch house.
11:38 I couldn't help but notice this one.
11:40 A couple of the guys who actually built the first atom bomb,
11:42 and one of them's got a big old bottle of whiskey.
11:47 Makes you think twice.
11:49 The so-called gadget completed,
11:52 the team drove the bomb roughly two miles to what's now known as Trinity Site,
11:58 where on July 16, 1945, at approximately 529 a.m.,
12:05 the world changed forever.
12:08 [explosion]
12:22 Well, right up ahead is the actual Trinity Site,
12:25 the original Ground Zero,
12:27 where on July 16, 1945,
12:30 America detonated the world's first atom bomb.
12:36 [music]
12:46 [music]
13:14 Today, a small lava rock obelisk memorializes the detonation spot,
13:20 the original Ground Zero.
13:23 All that remains from the 100-foot test tower
13:26 is a small piece of the original cement footing.
13:30 Everything else was vaporized in the explosion,
13:34 which was equivalent to about 18 kilotons of TNT.
13:39 The site is only mildly radioactive today,
13:42 not enough to worry about during a short visit.
13:45 Tomorrow, the Trinity Site will briefly open to the public,
13:49 which happens only one day a year,
13:52 and soon, maybe not even at all due to budget cutbacks.
13:56 So on a nearby fence, I find a few photographs put up for the open house.
14:02 [music]
14:18 It's not the radiation that has me feeling mixed up inside
14:21 at being in this place.
14:24 Robert Oppenheimer was undoubtedly elated
14:27 that his fiendishly complex gadget actually worked.
14:31 But at the same time,
14:33 gazing up at the seven-mile-high mushroom cloud he'd helped unleash,
14:38 he spoke aloud a quote from Hinduism's Bhagavad Gita.
14:44 "Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds."
14:50 [music]
14:57 It's been covered in now, but after the blast,
15:00 a 1,000-foot diameter circle around Ground Zero
15:03 was turned into glass by the heat of the blast.
15:06 This trinitite is all that remains now.
15:10 [wind]
15:15 Also weighing on me is the irony of my visit.
15:18 I've come to Trinity in a Japanese vehicle.
15:23 It was barely three weeks after the successful Trinity test here
15:27 that the U.S. dropped two similar atomic bombs on Japan,
15:31 ending World War II.
15:34 Today, the silence of this place is overwhelming.
15:49 [music]
15:59 [music]
16:09 [music]
16:19 [music]
16:24 It would be unfair to characterize White Sands as a valley of fire and destruction
16:29 because within the missile range lie regions of incomparable peace and beauty.
16:36 [music]
16:41 The White Sands National Monument, about two hours from Trinity,
16:46 encompasses the world's largest expanse of gypsum dunes,
16:50 275 square miles of sugar white sand, unlike anything else on Earth.
16:58 With dusk falling, the gentle dunes are a blissful release
17:03 from the sights and thoughts of today.
17:06 [music]
17:09 To walk here, especially amid the pink and purple hues of a falling dusk,
17:15 is to experience a powerful, calming contrast to the razor-edged rockets
17:21 and chilling reminders of atomic destruction you've witnessed earlier today.
17:26 The air is cool, the only sound a whisper of wind gently reshaping the dunes.
17:39 Northwest of White Sands, near Socorro, New Mexico,
17:43 awaits a man-made site of true astronomical proportions.
17:48 Here sprawls the National Radio Astronomy Observatory,
17:52 otherwise known as the VLA, or Very Large Array.
17:57 Each radio antenna here at VLA is 82 feet in diameter,
18:01 larger than the largest optical telescope in the world.
18:04 But individually, they can't see that well.
18:07 That's why VLA has 27 of them.
18:10 And using these rail transporters behind me, they can move them all over the site,
18:14 creating a radio telescope 27 miles in diameter,
18:18 allowing them to see way, way out into deep space,
18:21 distant galaxies, black holes, all kinds of cool stuff.
18:25 If these giant radio antennas look familiar,
18:28 that's because you've likely seen them in dozens of Hollywood movies.
18:33 Soon I meet up with VLA project scientist Rick Purley,
18:37 who shares a few out-of-this-world insights.
18:40 Rick, contrary to what a lot of people think, you're not part of the SETI project.
18:44 You're not looking for aliens or extraterrestrials.
18:46 No, there's no prohibition against people who want to use this array for those kinds of purposes,
18:52 but we're not really designed to do that.
18:54 This machine here, this telescope, is actually built to make pictures.
18:58 So if you think in terms of optical pictures that everybody has seen,
19:01 Hubble, space, telescope pictures, we make pictures in the radio emission.
19:06 Radio emission is the same as optical emission but a much longer wavelength.
19:10 Because it's a longer wavelength, we need a bigger telescope,
19:13 hence the big distances between the antennas here.
19:16 These things are so photogenic that Hollywood loves them too.
19:19 You've had contact films, Terminator, Salvation.
19:22 Do film crews come out often to use them for backgrounds?
19:25 On occasion. I remember that when the contact people were here,
19:29 it was actually very interesting because they built a replica control room.
19:35 So it was well understood they were going to be here for some time,
19:38 and there was some concern that there would be interference with operations.
19:42 So they built right over there a replica control room.
19:45 It didn't have a roof or walls, except for the one wall,
19:49 but it was a perfect, I believe it was a perfect replica of our real control room.
19:53 And Jody Foster and all the others did all their work in there.
19:57 And when they left, according to contract, they tore it all down,
20:00 and there's not a thing you can see that's left behind.
20:03 So they don't make too much of a mess.
20:05 No, no, no. It's understood that this is an active research area,
20:08 and they don't want to interfere.
20:10 Normally I'd hang around to grill Rick with more questions,
20:13 but right now I've got a sunset to catch.
20:16 Besides, if I stayed at the VLA past dinner time,
20:20 they might make me clean the dishes.
20:24 [music]
20:27 What the American Southwest offers,
20:37 especially for anyone seeking to hit the road and just get away for a while,
20:42 is space.
20:44 Infinite horizons.
20:47 Room to breathe and contemplate and recalibrate.
20:52 That's why the big thinkers and big doers always come.
20:57 And when you come, and you should,
21:00 I recommend doing so in a capable off-roader like the FJ.
21:04 Because then every corner of this singular landscape,
21:08 from desert scrub to wriggling mountain trail,
21:12 is yours to visit and experience and feel.
21:17 Such are the rare gifts that come to a man in space.
21:23 [music]
21:27 [music]
21:31 [music]
21:34 [music]
21:45 [music]
21:58 (upbeat music)