900 mm wading depth! Top 5 best cars for driving through floods in Malaysia

Monsoon season is here and you know what that means – floods. Generally, we don’t recommend driving through floods for numerous reasons but if you have to, we’ve listed a few tips here.

Anyway, let’s move on to the main topic at hand – cars with highest wading depth that are currently on sale in Malaysia. If you live in an area that is prone to floods and want a vehicle that is capable of wading through them, we’ve rounded up 5 of them for you.

1. Land Rover Discovery, 900 mm

Land Rover is pretty much synonymous with off-road. And going off road means you need to have good basic parameters like approach and departure angles, wheel travel, and wading depth.

The Land Rover Discovery has a wading depth of 900 mm with air suspension. Actually, the larger Range Rover has a wading depth of 900 mm too, but we picked the Discovery as it’s a little more obtainable, priced at RM 729,800 at point of its introduction in 2018.

2. Ford Ranger Raptor, 850 mm

Behold the Ford Ranger Raptor, the high-performance pick-up truck with uprated mechanical bits from the regular Ford Ranger. It’s priced at RM 208,888 (OTR without insurance).

Compared to the normal Ranger, it’s jacked up slightly, bringing the wading depth up by 50 mm to 850 mm with a ground clearance of up to 283 mm. But if the Raptor is a bit too extreme for you, then the regular Ranger with its 800 mm wading depth is still pretty impressive.

3. Nissan Leaf, 700 mm

Water and electric do go together after all, figuratively speaking of course. This may come as a surprise, but the all-electric Nissan Leaf has a wading depth of 700 mm. Yes, you read that right. 700 mm is the average wading depth for most pick-up trucks like the Toyota Hilux and Mitsubishi Triton.

How? Well, the battery packs and all the high voltage components are sealed off, which is the case for most EVs. So the traditional risks of driving combustion-engine cars through water don't apply to EVs.

However, most EV manufacturers don’t recommend this for obvious liability reasons. Even though the drive components are sealed, there is still a risk of heavy flood water getting into the components. So common sense still has to be applied before you start treating it as a submarine.

Interested in the Nissan Leaf? It can yours if you part ways with RM 181,263.

4. Toyota Fortuner, 700 mm

As mentioned earlier, 700 mm is a common figure for wading depth of pick-up trucks. Since the Toyota Fortuner is based on the Toyota Hilux, the Fortuner’s wading depth is identical at 700 mm. 

This applies to other truck-based SUVs as well. The Ford Everest which has a wading depth of 800 mm, same as the regular Ford Ranger. But since the Fortuner isn’t a truck, it’s subjected to excise duty and is priced considerably higher. It does get SST incentive at this period of time though. Prices start from RM 162,178 to RM 184,431.

5. Mercedes-Benz G-Class, 700 mm

Hailed as the “Godfather of SUVs”, the Mercedes-Benz G-Class (sometimes called the G wagon) boasts a wading depth of 700 mm with a ground clearance of 241 mm.

The recently announced Mercedes-Benz G350d AMG Line is priced just under a million ringgit at RM 999,888, making it the most expensive car here. The full-fat AMG variant, the G63 is priced at RM 1,464,888 when it was introduced in 2018.

And that’s it for our swimmers. We'd like to point out that the list above isn’t exhaustive, as most pick-up trucks weren’t mentioned. If they were, the list would just be predominantly trucks.

On a final note, there are always risks when threading through floodwater. Even with these heavy hitters, you should still avoid driving through floods whenever possible. As the saying goes, “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.”