How to drive downhill gravel

• Select four-wheel drive low range and activate Hill Descent Control.
• Adjust your speed accordingly with the +/- Cruise Control buttons on the steering wheel.
  
• Keep your foot off the brake as you descend the hill.
• Choose the line with the most traction, avoiding hazards such as ruts and loose gravel & rocks.

Video Transcript

All right, g’day it's Michael Guest here.

We're going to have a bit of a look at the new Amarok, this is the Pan Americana and put it through its paces so quite a steep hill to go down I you can see that brow there but it drops away quite quickly. Loose, sort of rocky surface there's a few bigger rocks involved there a couple little ruts that we've got to navigate as well.

So the Pan Americana's got all terrain tires that's what it comes with it's got upgraded springs shock absorbers a different steering tune so definitely set up for the off-road environment. There's some great tech involved in this new truck and one of the things it's got is hill descent and you can even adjust the hill descent speed up and down with your cruise control, some great features let's put it through its paces.

All right first things first, seat belt on, I'm going to go to click into neutral here and then scroll through the menu and I'm going around into full drive low range so that's proper full-time full drive low range okay there and then I want to hit this little button down here that says “hill descent control”, hill descent control ready beautiful okay and we're right to go little green light comes up on the dash we're in for low which we want to be in and then we can adjust it on this side of the steering wheel through the plus and minus with our cruise control and if the hill descent's a little bit too slow, because you got to remember down steep hills the worst thing you can do is try and stop halfway down the hill, like you need if you're going to if you're going to go down you got to keep going down because if you have some steering input on and you start to lock a rear wheel and the back of the car can slide and you don't want to, if you hit the brakes you're just going to increase that momentum that way, so we want to be driving down the hill but quite slowly and hill descent will do that all on its own.

All right let's go so into drive handbrake off, sunglasses on, always like wearing my sunny especially in dappled light I can I can peer through the light so we can we can just take our foot off the brake, might be a bit scary if you've never done this before. If you're new to four-wheel driving just take things as you go and we're doing 3 km an hour so we can, by pushing this button here, I can change that up a little bit with our cruise control, which is pretty cool.
So just pick a line, always pick this the line where it's swept and the most amount of traction is going to be, just cruise down we don't want any big steering inputs one side the other there's a big rock there that I want to miss there's a bit of a wash away with loose gravel, but just cruise down so foot off the brake and we're not touching the brake here we're letting the Amarok do all the work on its own, that's quite steep there it's 34° that hill it probably doesn't even show that through the camera but quite a steep hill.
And how easy is that just cruising down, I got to tell you, the tech is amazing and the new Amarok makes those steep hills a breeze.