The XA50 (5th gen) Rav4, Rav4 Hybrid, and Rav4 Prime are some of the most popular vehicles on the road. And with its latest iteration, there’s been a lot more emphasis on off-road with packages like the trail/adventure and TRD Off-Road trims coming out. Toyota even went as far as to develop a special torque vectoring rear differential for the off-road gasoline models. We wanted to go ahead and build a hybrid with off-road capability in mind, to this date, Toyota has only released sportier and more luxurious trims of the Hybrid and Prime, but no off-road variant. The hybrid is our favourite configuration as it gets over 30% better fuel economy than the gasoline variant and is about 0.6 to 0.8 seconds faster from 0-60 compared to the 2.5 gas engine. The Prime is the fastest by far but lead times for the prime exceeded a year even prior to the chip shortage and pandemic. Lead times in 2022 for primes are up to 2 years now and dealers have been marking up vehicles as much as $20000. The MSRP of the 2021 RAV4 hybrid was under $35000 CAD. At the time, the price difference between the XLE RAV4 hybrid and XLE gasoline was only about $2000 and the difference in power, residual value, and fuel economy made the hybrid a no-brainer. Suspension and Footwork We started off our build with addressing the footwork, with a mild lift and oversized Falken Wildpeak AT3W all terrain tires. The most popular size we saw for the XA50 chassis for overlanding/off-roading was 245/65-17 (29.5
