Does it really need to be there? It's a tray mount.
With respect, we, sitting here on our little forum, can't know what the engineers in one of the largest and oldest motor vehicle companies in the world are confronted with when designing these things. We don't know their brief, we don't know what they have been given as the design limits and we certainley don't know if the Australian outback traveler's penchant for bolting enormously heavy accessories onto these vehicles even gets a mention in their design meetings let alone our eagerness to force 50psi of air between the axle and the top bend of their chassis. And, in this day and age of platform vehicle building, we also don't know what other model constraints are put on the placement of chassis members.
To be blatantly frank I wouldn't build my outback tourer out of any of the current dual cab offerings for this very reason. The difference though is that I don't think these vehicles are inherently badly designed as some people seem to, or not fit for their design purpose , I simply don't think the design as it stands is up to what
we want to do with it.
I mean let's be honest, what could be harder on a vehicle than to load it often beyond its GVM, load it is such a way that it has a good portion of the heavy stuff cantilevered beyond the wheel base, force suspension loads in places the designers never allowed for then drive it over some of the most hellish roads in the world?
Sure the old girls may have thicker steel in their chassis but as the previous owner of two old skool Hilux's if i had loaded it the way we do today the engines would not have had enough oomph to get out of my driveway. was that then a design fault?
