The first thing I learned about driving in Iceland is that leaving the road in a car is expressly illegal. The second thing I picked up is that some of the country’s “roads” are so gnarly that it wouldn’t be surprising to see Bear Grylls making Amazon deliveries on them while riding a mountain goat. Or, driving a portal-axle Ineos Grenadier.
Ineos is a $65 billion petro-chem megacorp with 36 individual businesses under its umbrella. Ineos, the car company, is one of those businesses. You can find the Grenadier SUV and Quartermaster pickup truck’s short official history on the company site; my read on the origin story is that Ineos chairman Jim Ratcliffe wanted to make a cool truck, and happened to be wealthy and powerful enough to make it a reality.
I’ve never met Sir Ratcliffe, but I get the sense that he’s kind of an Elon Musk-y character except instead of cyberpunk, his aesthetic is Nigel Thornberry. So while Tesla bequeathed us the dystopian caricature Cybertruck, Ineos went hard the other way and created the ultimate vehicular fantasy of every khaki-shirted, roof-tenting overland enthusiast.
As a khaki shirt owner myself (one even has epaulets) the Grenadier is pretty much the exact truck I’d dream up if I were a billionaire. An old-school body-on-frame brick with round lights, a cab like the cockpit of a DC3, and a stately BMW turbo six under the hood? Are you kidding me? It’s one of the coolest ideas on the road right now!
Another fun automotive idea, albeit even more niche, is the portal axle. This brings us to today’s topic: Roaming around Iceland’s breathtaking terrain in Ineos Grenadier and Quartermaster prototypes running portal axles made by LeTech, an elite European off-road equipment outfit. I joined up with a small international team—a German, an Irishman, a dude coming in from Saudi Arabia, and me, the ‘Murican—to shake the rigs down and share what they’re like to wheel in.
After a day and a half of driving through some of the most disparate and dramatic environs I’ve seen in one corner of any country, my takeaway is that these trucks are tools and toys for true connoisseurs. The fun and functionality factors are extremely high, but some of the luxuries you might expect at this price are absent. So on one side of that coin, these trucks are charmingly characterful and engaging. On the other, they’re a lot of work to drive. A Ford Raptor’s more comfortable. A kitted-out Jeep Wrangler’s cheaper. But the Ineos Grenadier and Quartermaster are uniquely cool and novel for those who appreciate classic trucks for more than just their looks—these machines have huge personalities. Adding portal axles lifts them into truly rarified air, literally, giving them the ability to straddle and crawl over just about anything. And they look so good!
What’s the Deal With Portal Axles
Portal axles are conceptually simple but practically spectacular pieces of engineering that make the vehicle running them much taller than a traditional drivetrain allows. Instead of shafts and other components hanging down from the transmission and transfer case, portal axles put a stack of gears behind each driven wheel.
That setup lets the axle shafts be tucked up real high, so there’s very little hardware hanging down below the truck’s frame line. Add tall tires (we ran 37-inch BF Goodrich KM3 mud terrains), and you can make enough room to have a picnic under the vehicle while it’s parked.
This is not to scale or a real schematic, but it broadly illustrates how portal axle architecture differs from standard solid axles like the normal Grenadier has:
Portal axle downsides typically include sapping more power and efficiency than a traditional drivetrain does. They also cost a fortune—Ineos is still finalizing arrangements with LeTech for series production so customer pricing is TBA, but I bet it adds at least $30,000 to the truck’s price. Meanwhile, here are the LeTech truck dimensions. As you can see, its clearance and attack angles are extreme:
The base Grenadier starts at $75,000, putting it between a Ford Bronco Wildtrak and a Mercedes G550, which is a lot of money but feels justifiable in that context.
Trucks With Character You Can See and Feel
As intense as these vehicles look on your screen, they’re even more aesthetically extroverted in person. These red accessory-loaded rigs in particular looked like Lego masterpieces come to life.
Climbing in is a somewhat athletic endeavor. Before you even fire the thing up you’ve gotta channel your inner Australian shepherd and hup into the seat.
Taking in the switches and dash layout pulls you into an adventure fantasy. The ceiling switch panel is so purposeful it comes back around to being whimsical and I absolutely love it. There are big switches that toggle with delightfully satisfying clicks, even actions as mundane as flicking some lights on feel fun. This is no car, it’s a rig. While the features are numerous, the vibe isn’t exactly high-tech. Seven feet off the earth, which is about where your eyes are in the driver’s seat, you won’t be counting on cameras to navigate because you can see exactly where the square fenders end. Also, there are no cameras beyond the simple compulsory reverse unit.
The gauge cluster solution is a unique one that looks like it was inspired by a farm vehicle. Straight ahead of the driver is a small panel for warning lights and critical status alerts, while the speedo is tucked into a corner of a modestly sized center screen. It contributes to the utilitarian look for sure.
At the same time, the controls are intuitively laid out and easy to instantly get comfortable with. The infotainment software is refreshingly simple both in layout and design—there are no dumb animations to sit through while you cycle between drive modes, just the info you need in a legible font.
The only interior element that’s a little incongruous is the BMW shifter, the same you’d find in any other B58-powered car (3 Series, Z4, Supra, and others). It’s not the worst, just slightly odd-looking in this cab. There are no paddle shifters or sport modes for the transmission, but the manual shifting function on the console shifter is retained.
I don’t think this truck needs a manual transmission option; the eight-speed auto feels good and the manual gear override is there when you need it. There might not be room for a clutch pedal, anyway—the footwell is annoyingly tiny. Ineos’ people told me this was partially a byproduct of the exhaust manifold’s positioning and that it’s less of an issue in left-hand drive models (the portal axle prototrucks are right-hand drive). But there isn’t a bunch of room for boots in the front passenger footwell either. If you’ve ever driven a cab-over commercial truck you’ll feel right at home.
On the Road
Another big-truck characteristic of the Grenadier is its steering. Quite a few critics have complained about this (including here on The Drive) and I could see why as soon as I pulled the truck out of a parking space—turning requires you to spin the steering wheel like you’re opening the rescue hatch on a sinking submarine. In most common road-driving situations, it’s challenging to contend with.
But dismissing this as “it’s bad” isn’t quite right, either. In some ways, actually, the truck’s steering is great. Ineos’ people told me it’s being revised because customers can’t handle it (they said it more tactfully), but I would go so far as to say it’s pretty well suited to the rest of the truck. Basically, you have to move the steering wheel a lot to turn the wheels a little. Once you get used to it, that gives a driver room to make measured inputs over challenging terrain or tight trails. The steering’s design also soaks up all kinds of impacts from rough ground—plowing across crags and corrugations doesn’t send twitches up to the helm hardly at all.
If you’re punching through a jungle or crossing a rope bridge over a chasm, the kind of extreme things you want to imagine a Grenadier doing, you’d be grateful for the way this truck steers. It’s just that not too many people, even those who are off-road with some regularity, find themselves in such a situation all that often.
As far as handling everyday driving activities, like merging onto the highway, acceleration is adequate and so is chassis balance. The portal axle setup hasn’t robbed the truck of the ability to get out of its own way. Not sure I’d try making any particularly ambitious passes on a two-laner, though.
Don’t worry, keeping this thing within the lines of a single lane will keep you plenty busy. When the Icelandic wind gusted, with about enough force to blow a Suzuki Jimny into the ocean by the way, I had to countersteer so hard that traction control started intervening thinking I was in a 55-mph slide. But even in the fleeting moments of fair weather we had, keeping a truck this tall going straight was a lot of work. Think of it like looking after a puppy—divert your attention for a beat and it’ll wander off on you. My Scout is the same way. It’s just old-school truck things.
All this to say: The portal-axle Ineos rigs have the road manners you should expect of a purpose-made cross-country machine. This is not a luxury vehicle with off-road capabilities; it’s a monster truck that has to be treated with respect and driven with concentration. And when you get it off the pavement, the payoff is immense.
Into the Wilderness
The portal-axle Grenediar is full-time four-wheel drive, with lever-activated low range and a center locking diff. Once locked in low, there’s also a rear and front locker you can toggle individually that could move you through anything short of pyroclastic flow. Luckily, Iceland hasn’t had a volcano erupt in… about a year. Yeah, we did move across some earth that was quite literally still smoldering from the last time the island cooked a city with lava. But before that, we wheeled through the cold water of the Thousand River Road, up and down the rocky tracks of Þakgil (pronounced “thak-gil”), and across the fiercely hostile black sand of Solheimafjara (“soh-lay-im fee-ah-rah”).
Deep river crossing is undoubtedly one of this truck’s best party tricks. With so much height and clearance, our Ineoses were happy as hippos to be splashing in and out of fast-flowing water features. And I’m not talking about streams you charge through to get a fun picture—I lost track of how many times we crossed waist-deep water features that forced us to break through wind-kicked waves.
On low-traction trails and steep scrambles, it was pretty funny to be able to straddle rocks I’d normally have to be very tactical about placing wheels on. That steering that’s annoying in a parking lot pays off when you’re zooming over roughness or picking your way down a goat path.
The only off-road context the truck didn’t seem exceedingly comfortable in was high-speed sand driving. Blasting across a soft beach, my Saudi colleague was keen to see how well the Grenadier’s tail would step out, and each disruption of the steering wheel felt like a tempting of fate. I held on to the little passenger-side roller coaster grip as the cab swayed like a pirate ship. To the truck’s credit, it stayed upright, but I think we were only a couple of degrees yaw from turning the thing into a new coral reef.
Tall trucks all have a high center of gravity, of course, but this is further exaggerated with a portal axle vehicle. Solid axles and driveshafts and differentials themselves are pretty heavy, which in part contributes to stability in a normal truck. Move all that weight upwards and the truck cab can feel like a bit of a pendulum.
Keeping the truck on a more conservative forward march wasn’t nearly as unsettling though, and steering inputs on more firm ground felt fine too. The Quartermaster pickup truck in particular, with a slightly longer wheelbase, felt more planted everywhere.
Reeling either vehicle back in from a gallop was easier than I expected. Considering the loads of momentum and huge wheels in the mix here, the brakes did pretty darn well to stop the trucks on and off-road.
I was also impressed by the suspension’s versatility. Years ago I drove the portal-axle Mercedes G-Wagen, which had a crazy KW coilover suspension setup that was so soft the truck would rock back and forth like a coin-op kid’s ride outside a grocery store when you came to a stop. The portal-axle Ineos trucks did no such thing. Not only that, but I was pleased to realize that the suspension here did a pretty nice job of splitting the difference between soft and firm for such a wild breadth of terrain types.
The Harsher Realities of Real Trucks
The portal-axle Ineos Grenadier and Quartermaster are super cool, objectively exceptional, and ultimately uncompromising. They are extreme machines that require real expertise to be appreciated—which is how it should be.
These LeTech prototypes are old-school, hardcore trucks paired with novel designs and a long list of fun safari features we didn’t even have time to play with on our quick Icelandic expedition. Mass-appeal sweeteners like sound deadening, social media connectivity, sun visor mirrors, 360-degree parking cameras, and all the other idiot-proofing bullshit features forced down our throats in just about every other car are absent.
The controls are clearly labeled, but make no mistake, there’s a real learning curve to driving this and not everyone will be up for it. I absolutely love these Ineos trucks but I wouldn’t pull it out for every drive. The wind noise is relentless, the stereo’s bad, and it takes some actual mental energy to manage this machine. Fuel economy on a standard Grenadier is 15 mpg in town and on the highway, I would expect single digits with portal axles.
I’ll tell you what, though—all the truck’s weaknesses as a daily driver make the adventures you do drive it on feel even more exciting.
The Incredible Terrain of Iceland
In Iceland, in November, the sun doesn’t get off the horizon until almost 10 o’clock in the morning. Wind and rain can appear with the rage of a contemptuous god in an instant. Nevertheless, our expedition’s camera crew slogged through it all to capture images that were nothing less than epic and it’d be a crime for them to sit on hard drives unappreciated. Some of mine are mixed in here, too. Here are my favorite frames.
Correction: I initially misspelled Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s last name! An embarrassing error that has been rectified, sorry folks.