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Old 04-29-2015, 10:13 AM   #18 (permalink)
elhigh
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Location: SE USA - East Tennessee
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Josie - '87 Toyota Pickup
90 day: 29.5 mpg (US)

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I look at the various ways you can purchase a truck and find that the unitized construction, while thrifty and lightweight and perfectly okay for a car, would be a serious limitation for something as versatile as a truck chassis.

I'm thinking just of my old Toyota right now, but it applies across the entire range of pickups, even today.

The smallest U-haul used to be a Toyota cab and chassis, with a small box, about 8'. Remember those?

Going up a size, there were the many compact RVs based on compact pickups. There are larger models based on the larger American models too:
This is about as much as you can reasonably expect of a compact pickup chassis, except...

The Hilux was available as a 1-ton model, even with duallies and a flatbed (stakes optional)

I liked those and when I was shopping for a truck, I looked for one on the used market. No dice.

So while it might make sense in certain paradigms to consider a unitized chassis for trucks, in most paradigms it doesn't. There are too many sub-markets that use the truck as a starting point for their product. Granted they don't represent a large portion of the market but when did you last see any manufacturer willingly cede ANY sales to a competitor?

I can only think of two exceptions to this: the Honda Ridgeline and the Subaru Brat. The Brat was never considered a real truck, not even by Subaru. They were actually trying to horn in on compact truck sales with a truckified Loyale. And Honda will call their crossbred monstrosity a truck, but precious few people (Motor Trend and its dubious judgment notwithstanding) will look at that thing and call it a truck. It's a tall car with a lidless trunk.
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Last edited by elhigh; 04-29-2015 at 10:19 AM..
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