'Those huge tyres operate at super-low pressures to "float" on snow or sand'
'They come in all shades of modification'
'The huge tyres are designed to operate at super-low pressures'
'You can hire a SuperTruck in Iceland as easily as a Mondeo'
'The themselves do very little damage to the terrain they drive over'
'The whole thing is absolutely brilliant'
They call them 'SuperTrucks'.
Full-sized 4x4s of wildly varying vintages, all perched precariously atop huge tyres that vary in size from the relatively massive 38-inch to the truly monster truck-like 44-humongous inches.
They come in all shades of modification; from simple suspension lifts and the aforementioned tyres, to full glacier-traversing winter survival trucks complete with double-skin insulated interiors, and 'clockwork' super-super low ratios and on-board tyre-pressure altering so that they can crawl across soft snow without bogging down.
Beware though, this is not Formula Off-Road - where 2,500bhp nitrous-powered rollcages on wheels try to defiantly drive up near-vertical cliff faces, or over water - but what Icelanders regard as pretty stock out-of-town transport.
See, Iceland consists of roughly one major arterial road - Highway One - which rings the island. The rest are either town roads, or unmade highways. And when we say 'unmade', we really mean 'strewn with car-destroying rocks'.
So to really see your post-apocalyptic lava-born home country, you adapt a car that is capable of taking you there.
Which means there's a whole country that regards fairly serious off-roading as a natural part of, say, a family picnic. Everything from black sand beaches around the coast (littered with block-of-flats-sized icebergs in winter), to pure white expenses of glacial snow and ice up on the mountains.
Because the general terrain is either renewable within hours (you won't see your own tracks in the snow after a couple of minutes in winter, the snow is that quick) or terribly hardy (rock tracks and lava beaches are hard to hurt), there's not a great deal of environmental impact to deal with.
It also helps that because of those huge tyres, which are designed to operate at super-low pressures to 'float' on snow or sand, the trucks themselves do very little damage to the terrain they drive over.
They spread their weight so successfully that it's possible to drive over an arm without hurting it. I know - I've done it. Being driven over by a 1989 Toyota LandCruiser was an experience I hope never to repeat.
What this means is that off-roading doesn't a) tear up the countryside or b) get on anyone's nerves because everyone does it. It's not a minority sport; you can hire a 'SuperTruck' in Iceland as easily as a Mondeo. Go on SuperTruck tours. Buy the T-Shirt, drink from the branded mug.
Being a Brit, I obviously grabbed the nearest Land Rover Experience team and used a SuperTruck version of the 2007 Defender to do my Icelandic adventure - and the only thing separating my ride from the local wagons was the fact that we looked way, way over-prepared compared to locals, who were popping down to the shops in the things.
But the whole thing is absolutely brilliant. A completely different way of looking at what is, in Britain, a relatively low-key pastime.
The only trouble is that you spend a day doing what feels like some pretty serious off-roading to get to a particularly special vantage point, only to find a family of four and their SuperTruck Ssangyong Musso wandering about at the summit. Bugger.