IS IT WORTH IT? Upgrade 2017 RAV4 or sell for a 4X4 truck?

Now isn’t the best time to buy a car because the market is unusually high.

Capabilities wise, your RAV4 will be able to go anywhere you need it to go (besides rock crawling type terrain) with those mods, but I don’t think any of them are worth putting on a credit card - especially if you still gotta pay the 20k off.

If it saves you money to pay off the loan early then focus your efforts on that, or else it’s basically costing you more money for the same mods.

If it doesn’t save you money to pay it early then just save up the $3,800 and then do the mods.

Or sell the Rav and buy a beater truck for $1,000 if you don’t need it to get to work.

Very cool mods, but you can still enjoy your adventures until they’re in the budget

Go for it, specially with all the incentives that the government is giving out to people.

let_us_rav(e) said:

Or sell the RAV and buy a beater truck for $1,000 if you don’t need it to get to work.

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I have a feeling that if you do the Expensive! upgrades to the RAV4 to improve its off-road abilities you'll soon be stretching them with more difficult terrain. So, IMO leave the RAV4 as is, a highway car with "soft-roading" capability and spend the 4K on a slightly-better-than beater 4X4 pickup.

In my son's experience the least expensive ones are the Nissan Frontiers. He lives off-road on Maui where a 4X4 is required to get up and down his 5 mph driveway, which is more like a widened cart path. A RAV4 would get beaten up on it. He just sold one of his two Frontiers for a Nissan Xterra, which he says LOVES his driveway.

Dr. Dyno said:

I have a feeling that if you do the Expensive! upgrades to the RAV4 to improve its off-road abilities you'll soon be stretching them with more difficult terrain.

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Agreed. From the sound of it, you probably want more than the Rav4 can reliably provide... It will likely get you there, but at a cost of wear & tear... A Body-on-frame vehicle sounds more like what you're desiring... Unibody construction just wasn't really intended for that level of abuse. Just my 2c.

What Dr. Dyno and TomKatt said. You can lift the RAV4 and put off-road tires on it, but you will still have weak MacPherson suspension in the front, not much better multilink suspension in the rear, and a weak unibody structure. RAV is a soccer-mom mall crawler, it won't withstand real off-road use. Busted bushing, bent control arms, broken body welds, etc., etc. You will end up with a lot of expensive repairs, trash your car and lose all resale value. Buy a pickup truck or a body-on-frame SUV. There are a few well-designed unibody SUVs that can handle off-roading very well (Jeep Grand Cherokee, VW Touareg), but not Toyota.

I say still do it. It will give you satisfaction that you're the first one in your town to do this set. Besides... its just money

Bikeandfish said:

I still owe about $20k on my Rav, and the upgrades would probably go on my credit card.
Is an upgrade like this worth it? or should I just switch to a 4x4 truck?

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How do you still owe $20K on a 2017? Especially if you bought it new and have been paying on it for four years.