What happens when the grandson of the man who built the original Land Rover starts making the hitches that go on the front of your caravan? You get Cruisemaster — and one of the most quietly impressive engineering stories in Australian off-road history.

In this episode, Sam sits down with Andrew Goddard, Managing Director of Cruisemaster and AutoPacific Group, alongside MDC Managing Director Vaughan Hindley and General Manager of Commercial & Product James Field. Together, they trace the Goddard family's engineering DNA from post-war England all the way to Brisbane — and into the front of more than 40,000 MDC caravans currently out on Australian roads.

Andrew pulls back the curtain on how the DO35 came to be, why the patented Checklock cap exists (spoiler: a caravan came off the back of a car at 100kph on a test Run), and what it actually takes to build a product tough enough for the tracks Australians are increasingly headed down. Vaughan shares why MDC made the call to switch to the DO45 for the new Gold Class AC22C — and why, across 40,000-plus units, they've never once had a DO35 failure in the field.

In this episode, we cover: the Goddard family engineering legacy and the original Series 1 Land Rover connection, the evolution of the DO35 from fabricated prototype to V3 Plus, the move to the DO45 for MDC's Gold Class range, why real-world testing beats the lab every single time, the RAT Run origin story and what's been learned in the field, and how Cruisemaster has kept its identity after joining AutoPacific Group.

Explore the full MDC range at https://www.marketdirect.com.au — and don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode.

Escape with Confidence

Escape with Confidence