This is not your grandfather’s towbar…

It isn’t even your dad’s. Back in the day, you got a towbar and it was a piece of metal attached to the back of your 4WD so you could take your boat or camper trailer out.

With the X-Bar, everything has changed, for perhaps the first time in a couple of generations.

I’ve been testing this out up in the Top End, and I fell in love pretty much instantly. I love how it fits in with the styling of the rest of the truck, but really, where it shines is in doing trackside recoveries without wasting time and effort.

It is the towbar reimagined and reengineered from scratch.

To start with, the bar itself, where it attaches to the chassis rails, sits between the rails instead of below them. A drop tongue is integrated into the design to allow a greater departure angle when you aren’t towing.

But what really sets this bar apart, especially for anyone who has ever been involved in a recovery (which is all of us!), is the three rated recovery points built into the back of the bar.

These give you, for the first time in my experience, quick, easy to use recovery points that you can use without doing things the old way: pulling the pin on the coupling tongue and slotting a snatch strap in the pin, which technically was never rated for that in the first place.

Now it’s easy to set up multiple anchors, for instance with a bridle, or to be able to use shackles to set up complex recoveries in seconds instead of minutes.

The design is pretty smart, too, and will complement just about any touring build in the same way that a smartly designed bullbar can for the front end.

Great looks, great functionality and the reliability that we’ve come to expect from Hayman Reese…this is a great example of something we didn’t know we needed becoming a part of our everyday touring lives.

For more information visit www.haymanreese.com.au