Trailbreaker

Trailbreaker is the Ark's defensive strategist, a Toyota Hilux 4WD camper truck who generates an impenetrable force field and rolls on gripping magnawheels. He is also the crew's cheerleader, always ready with a joke or a crack to lighten a grim mood, and the humour is at least partly a screen for a low opinion of himself. His body is the most fuel-hungry on the Ark and his vehicle mode is slow, and he is painfully aware that both facts make him a drain on limited resources. On his better days he only feels like a one-trick pony whose one trick everyone takes for granted. His own bio quote is the whole character: "An Autobot's as good as the fuel in his tank."

The other Autobots do not share the assessment, and the cartoon backs them up. His force field contains the burning off-shore oil rig in the pilot while Wheeljack douses it. It deflects Slag's fire-breath during the Dinobots' unveiling, though it merely redirects the flames onto Sunstreaker. It contains the explosion of an unstable meteorite fragment in Wheeljack's lab in "War of the Dinobots". On the acid-rain mission to Cybertron in "Divide and Conquer" he does not think to use it until Chip Chase's pep talk reminds him, which is his self-doubt in miniature.

He is also used as a spy in "More than Meets the Eye, Part 2", camping out near the Decepticon base with Sparkplug and Spike to learn about the Burma raid, and carries a jammer beam for masking approaches. Convincing him any of this matters remains difficult; once he starts moping, it takes a shove to get him moving.

Projects an effectively impenetrable force field that can contain a fire, an explosion or acid rain, and shield himself and others; also carries a jammer beam for masking an approach, wrist-mounted twin blasters, and magnawheels that grip almost any surface. The cost is severe: his force field consumes fuel at a punishing rate and his form is already the most fuel-consumptive on the Ark, so he cannot hold it indefinitely. His vehicle mode is slow, and in the Marvel comics he is repeatedly shot down before he can raise the field at all.

• Chip Chase: the human whose encouragement snaps Trailbreaker out of his self-doubt on the acid-rain mission to Cybertron.
• Wheeljack: the pairing the cartoon returns to, Trailbreaker containing whatever Wheeljack's science is about to set off.
• Brawn: his usual driving companion in season one, the two of them stumbling into the Seekers at the steel refinery in "Fire on the Mountain".
• Sunstreaker: on the receiving end of Trailbreaker's deflected fire in "S.O.S. Dinobots" and a source of cracks about his bulk.

Marvel treats the force field as a running joke by never letting him deploy it, shooting him down before he can raise it in "Man of Iron" and again against Shockwave's false Prime, and repeatedly benching him for being too low on fuel to fight. The cartoon lets the shield actually work and makes it central to several missions.

No confirmed on-screen fate. Storyboards for The Transformers: The Movie showed his body among the dead at the end of the Autobot City battle, but the shot did not make the finished film, and an early draft script had him survive both assaults as part of a guerrilla unit led by Blaster on Earth.

• The toy is a Toyota Hilux N40 4WD camper truck, originally a Takara Diaclone release, which is why the truck roof has an opening hatch for a pilot figure the Transformers version never came with. The mould was retooled into Hoist.
• His preliminary name was "Guzzle", and the figure that eventually got that name shares Trailbreaker's French-Canadian name, "Glouton", meaning glutton.
• Optimus Prime calls him "Trailblazer" in a one-off dialogue error in the 1985 episode "A Prime Problem", a slip later reused deliberately as a name in other continuities.
• From 2011 Hasbro substituted "Trailcutter" when the Trailbreaker trademark lapsed, and the IDW comics adopted it; the original name returned for the 2016 Combiner Wars toy.
• Toy and animation model differ sharply, especially the head, and nobody has ever settled whether the radar scanner attaches to the back of his head, as on the toy, or to his back.

Where the cartoon, the Marvel comics and the toy bios disagree, or where a popular claim does not hold up. We record these rather than smoothing them over.

• Whether he died at Autobot City: storyboards say yes, an early draft script has him surviving into a guerrilla campaign, and the released film shows neither.
• The name is unstable across continuities, running as Trailbreaker, Trailcutter and, from a one-line 1985 cartoon error, Trailblazer.
• Whether the radar scanner belongs on the back of his head or his back, an inconsistency between his toy and his animation model that later designers have never resolved.
• Marvel and the cartoon disagree on whether the force field is a reliable asset or a power he can rarely get up in time.