If you’ve spent any time around campers and DIY tinkerers, you know one truth: the right multitool can save your day, whether you’re wrestling with a stubborn tent stake in the mud or chasing a loose cabinet screw at home. Gerber clearly knows that too, and its Stakeout lineup has been quietly evolving from a pure camp companion into something more hybrid – and a little more honest about how we actually live.

The new Stakeout Drive is basically Gerber’s way of saying, “Look, you’re not in the backcountry 365 days a year, so here’s a tool that makes just as much sense in your hallway junk drawer as it does clipped to your pack.” The original Stakeout, launched in 2022, pitched itself as a base camp multitool, and last year’s Stakeout Spark doubled down on that identity by adding fire-starting capability to the mix. With the Drive variant, however, Gerber leans into weekday reality: quick repairs at home, tightening bits on your bike rack, tweaking something under the hood, and then tossing the same tool into your bag for a weekend road trip.​

The big shift is right there in the name – “Drive.” Instead of trying to cram in every possible wilderness trick, Gerber has built this model around a direct-access bit driver, the kind of thing you actually reach for when a loose screw is annoying you far more often than a surprise thunderstorm does. The driver flips out in a familiar way, echoing the concept from Gerber’s Armbar Drive, and immediately becomes the centerpiece of the tool. Gerber pairs it with a two-sided bit stored inside the driver and an extra bit tucked into the handle, giving you four different driver functions on board without needing a separate bit kit rattling around in your pocket. For a lot of users, that’s the difference between “cool gadget” and “this actually replaces a small toolbox.”​

Interestingly, that evolving focus has a downside for hardcore campers: the Stakeout Drive quietly ditches the tent stake puller that helped define the original family. You can still pry or wiggle stubborn stakes out using other parts of the tool, but it’s no longer a dedicated feature. In a way, that decision underlines where Gerber thinks this product fits – less the hero of a minimalist backpacking kit, more the everyday fixer that happens to be perfectly fine riding along to the campsite in your RV, truck, or duffel bag. If your life swings between apartment maintenance and weekend trailheads, that trade-off will probably feel fair.

Gerber hasn’t let go of the Stakeout identity entirely, though; the Drive borrows the same folding multiplier chassis introduced on the Spark, so you still get a familiar feel if you’ve handled the earlier models. Those pliers bring both regular and needle-nose jaws, plus inner wire cutters – a combo that’s just as handy for stripping a cable in your garage as it is for tweaking gear on a fishing trip or camp kitchen. Around that core, Gerber packs in a 2.4‑inch plain-edge blade, a pair of small scissors, and a three‑grit file with a chisel edge, plus a ruler etched along the handle for quick measurements when you’re eyeballing spacing or hardware. It’s a fairly restrained tool loadout by multitool standards, but that restraint is what keeps it focused and reasonably compact.​

Where Gerber still feels a bit stubborn is with the now-infamous carabiner-style clip that sticks out from one end of the handle like a design decision nobody wanted to be the one to cancel. It’s the one visual element tying all three Stakeout models together at this point, and also the most polarizing. The idea is understandable: double up on carry options with both a pocket clip and a carabiner so you can clip the tool to a pack strap or belt loop. In practice, the carabiner feels oversized, makes the tool longer and slightly awkward in profile, and just looks redundant when the pocket clip already covers most everyday carry scenarios.​

To be fair, that carabiner does try to pull its weight by doubling as a bottle opener, which means it still has some party trick value when you’re around a cooler and the only opener in sight is mysteriously “missing.” But let’s be honest: most people who buy multitools already have multiple bottle openers within reach – in the tool itself, on a keychain, or hidden in some other bit of gear. The more compelling move would probably have been to make that carabiner removable, or replace it with something lower profile, like a simple lanyard attachment that doesn’t dictate the silhouette of the whole tool.

Dimension-wise, the Stakeout Drive lands in that middle ground where it’s not ultralight backpacker gear, but it’s not a brick either. Closed, it measures 4.6 inches (11.7cm) to the tip of that protruding carabiner and weighs 7.4oz. That puts it into “throw it in the bag and forget about it until you need it” territory more than “I hardly notice this in my pocket,” which actually suits its hybrid mission well. With a price tag of around $80 and a limited lifetime warranty, it’s positioned as a practical upgrade over cheaper no-name tools, without trying to compete head-to-head with premium, high-end multipliers that cost significantly more.​

In a crowded multitool market, what makes the Stakeout Drive interesting isn’t that it tries to out-gimmick everyone; it’s that Gerber is clearly watching how people really use their gear. The original Stakeout family was very much a “leave this at base camp” proposition, with campsite-first features like a dedicated tent stake puller and, in the Spark’s case, integrated fire-starting capability. With the Drive, they’ve pivoted toward the reality that most of us spend more hours tightening random screws, trimming loose threads, opening packaging, and doing quick fixes around cars and bikes than we do striking sparks into tinder. The result is a multitool that still looks at home on a camp table, but now arguably earns its keep Monday to Friday as well.​

If you’re the kind of person who loves the idea of one tool that can ride seamlessly from the glovebox to the garage to the campsite, the Stakeout Drive is exactly that pitch distilled into hardware. You get pliers, blade, scissors, file, and a surprisingly capable bit driver system in a chassis that feels purpose-built for daily jobs first and backcountry second. And no, it doesn’t have a nail cutter yet – so you can’t quite call it the ultimate daily essentials kit – but at the rate Gerber has been iterating on this lineup, you probably wouldn’t want to joke about that too loudly around their product team.