Just three weeks ago, the CarTrek Season 9 finale aired on Tavarish’s channel. I, like many others I’m sure, thought that would be the last CarTrek for the next few months at least.

Boy, were we glad to be wrong!

Following a LIVE marathon of seasons one through nine, CarTrek Season 10 dropped as a feature-length, hour-and-a-half, video as opposed to the episodic series we have been treated to so far. I was positively surprised by this change of pace but I couldn’t help wondering what the reasoning behind it was. Luckily for all of you, I have Ed on speed dial at this point so I asked him just that.

“We wanted it to feel like more of an event,” he said. “We also wanted to see how YouTube as a platform, would change the way it gets recommended and propagated internally. So far, the response has been great!”

And with such a lineup, how could it do anything BUT succeed? Tasked with finding three awful off-road vehicles to tough the historic Oregon trail, the trio scraped the depths of AutoTempest to see what was available.

On the side of Mr. Bolian we have a Range Rover that was questionably modified to have six wheels instead of its factory four. You’d think that would make it better, but one of the axles is nothing more than a rounded-off anchor so instead of a useful 6×6, it’s a weighty 6×4. Eagle-eyed viewers, and those who attended this year’s Concours D’Lemons with us, might recognize this car as the one brought out by John Ficarra! That Rover has such a storied past in fact, that Ed made an entirely separate video just about it! Either way, it’s good to see it used the way it was intended even if it isn’t very good at it.

From the finest nail salon in Wichita comes Tyler Hoover in a 2019 Maserati Levante with NSFW-named off-road tires! Nobody has used a Levante in this way and it might just be for a good reason. It remains to be seen if this Italian named after a “warm, easterly wind that blows in the western Mediterranean Sea, southern France, down to the Strait of Gibraltar” can do more than crawl to the nearest mall.

Freddy too brought out a car from one of his previous videos, that being the 2004 Audi Allroad that broke down quite literally as soon as it arrived in his driveway. This particular example has been made slightly more reliable through the exclusion of the ever-so-faulty air ride suspension system and incredibly uglier thanks to a bedliner and Golf Harlequin-style rattle can paint job.

So grab your snack and a tall glass of your favorite beverage because this CarTrek is a non-stop rollercoaster of bad decisions and near-death experiences, otherwise known as a good time!