Yahoo Autos Five Most Practical Pickups
Pickup trucks have been an American mainstay, the warp in the weave of our automotive fabric, since the first Ford Model T runabout with a pickup body rolled off the line more than 80 years ago. Country music hits such as “Big Ol’ Truck” and “She Wants to Drive My Truck (Dance Mix)” document the proletariat’s romance with the pickup, as integral to their identities as their livelihoods. If social norms force Bay Area residents into hybrids, then you had better be a U.S. Army Ranger and mixed-martial-arts champion if you want to drive anything but a pick-’em-up in Tuscaloosa or pretty much anywhere NPR isn’t on the radio dial.
Hard numbers drive the point home, or in this case, to the lumber yard. The Ford F-series truck has been the bestselling vehicle in this country for each for the past 23 years. According to television commercials, real trucks are driven by men who smell of Old Spice, spent gunpowder, and burned coffee, men who powerslide their chrome-wheeled chariots through muddy construction sites before dropping 6000 pounds of rebar 20 feet into the bed in slow motion. These men need big trucks with chrome grilles measured by the acre, trucks that could strike fear into the armored heart of an International MaxxPro MRAP.
As fuel prices continue to rise, we expect to see a commensurate decline in the number of urban/suburban new-car buyers who think they need a truck. We’ve come up with five categories we feel reflect the fundamental needs of pickup customers buying trucks to be trucks, and not just Texas Cadillacs. These categories are affordability, comfort and convenience, fuel economy, budget capability, and towing.
The Affordability Champ: 2008 Toyota Tacoma
Base Price: $14,965
How badly does Toyota want a bigger piece of the pickup-truck market? It built—from scratch—a carbureted, cetacean-era, pushrod V-8 so it could run in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series, disavowing 60 years of development in internal-combustion technology.
Toyota also offers up, at $14,965, the cheapest buy in the mid-size-truck segment. Although it’s the cheapest to buy, the Taco probably isn’t the cheapest to produce, with a quality feel that makes it the bestseller in the segment. If we had to pick an engine to power a backup generator for a field hospital, it might be the Tacoma’s base four-cylinder, which makes 159 horsepower and 180 pound-feet of torque.
What you won’t get at that price are frills; you get a rear-wheel-drive Tacoma with a five-speed manual transmission and no floor mats. A $1095 Enhancement package adds nicer 15-inch wheels and air conditioning. Fortunately, the standard cloth interior is comfortable, even if the seating position is a bit low to the floor.
Despite sharing a chassis with the 4Runner and the capable FJ Cruiser, the Tacoma doesn’t exhibit their stiff structures. The decision to trade handling for ride quality means it drives like a Camry with a lift kit, which to most of the population is high praise.
The Comfort-and-Convenience Choice: 2008 Honda Ridgeline
Base Price: $28,635
Unlike most other manufacturers, Honda is not out to convince potential buyers that its truck is some kind of mechanical Viagra. Many truck buyers do not need the large towing and load numbers engendered by body-on-frame construction, and no one begs for the usually inevitable trade-offs in ride, handling, and braking performance. Giving people what they need rather than what they think they need isn’t always a winning business proposition, as attested to by the Ridgeline’s sales numbers.
Still, the driver’s pickup employs a four-wheel independent suspension, also unique in the segment, that pays huge dividends in ride-and-handling prowess. The Ridgeline is a truck that drives like a car, because it kind of is.
The Ridgeline’s four-wheel-drive system is designed to provide traction on demand but not at the expense of fuel economy or drivability. The Ridgeline is again unique in that its 247-hp V-6 sends power to the front wheels until tire slippage sends the rear axle into action. With our feet at the pedals, the Ridgeline returned a highly respectable 19 mpg over the course of our 40,000-mile long-term test. The Ridgeline’s towing capacity is limited to 5000 pounds, less than that of other mid-size trucks, but this suffices for most people who tow their ski boat to the lake on the weekend or, if you’re like us, a car to the racetrack.
For the majority of truck owners who live in suburban areas, the large amount of lockable storage space, both in the nine-cubic-foot trunk set into the floor of the pickup bed and the rear-passenger compartment, makes a big difference if you don’t want that new 12-hp Shop-Vac walking out of the bed when you stop for a burger on the way home from the Home Depot.
The Fuel-Economy Leader: 2008 Ford Ranger/2008 Mazda B-series
Base Price: $15,155/$16,170
After losing out to the Tacoma for the title of thriftiest pickup by a few cases of Busch Light, the Ford Ranger/Mazda B-series twins take the title of most-fuel-efficient pickup truck, if only by 1 mpg and if only because they are smaller, lighter, and weaker. As equipped with a 143-hp, 2.3-liter four-cylinder, rear-wheel drive, and a five-speed manual transmission, they return 21 mpg in the city and 26 on the highway. That mileage might make you smile, but the tepid acceleration won’t.
Just how popular is the Ford Ranger/Mazda B-series? More than 75,000 were sold in 2007, but try finding an editorial review written in the past seven years. Our last Ranger stopped by the office in June 2001. This Ford/Mazda pair is the vehicular equivalent of tube socks, which receive no coverage in fashion magazines but remain consistent sellers nonetheless. Rangers still sell because a lot of people who need pickups need only little pickups with little engines. Everywhere else in the world, people also farm and employ large sheets of plywood in the construction of buildings but do so without pickups that weigh more than four tons.
Like a 44-year-old packed into a pair of skinny jeans, the Ranger’s interior features stuff that the kids are doing these days—like an input jack for an MP3 player—but there’s no hiding the fact that the fundamental design work on this truck, both mechanically and aesthetically, was done a decade ago. At last report, this not-so-dynamic duo will board a train bound for the glue factory in 2009.
Budget Capability King: 2008 Chevrolet Silverado 1500
Base Price: $18,425
Americans like choices; so sayeth the options list for the Chevrolet Silverado. It contains a headache-inducing quantity of bed, chassis, cab, and powertrain configurations and can be built out to a diesel-snorting, six-wheeled beast with a bovine-lined interior and a sticker price well over $50,000. Strip a half-ton Silverado 1500 like it’s a mountain full of coal in West Virginia, however, and you’ll still end up with a real truck for only $18,425.
The Silverado’s GMT900 platform is one of the most rigid truck chassis in existence, and in conjunction with coil-over front shocks, it makes the Silverado one of the best-driving trucks on the market. Rack-and-pinion steering is to thank for being able to associate the phrase “steering feel” with a GM truck product for the first time ever; gone is reciprocating-ball vagueness well approximated by spinning an oar in a bucket of oatmeal.
One place our budget hauler won’t wow you is thrust. The base engine offered in the Silverado is a 4.3-liter V-6. The 195 horsepower and the 260 pound-feet of torque aren’t sufficient for even the most meager of burnouts, but they’re enough to tow up to 4900 pounds or haul a ton of concrete. The cheapest V-8 nets you another 100 horsepower (and the same dated four-speed automatic) for just $795 and only a 1-mpg penalty in both city and highway driving. Although neither towing nor hauling capacity increases substantially with the upgrade, drivability is vastly improved.
The Tow Hog: 2008 Ford F-250
Price as Equipped: $24,495
Like a Percheron, this beast is built to do one thing: pull stuff. A Ford F-250 Super Duty with a V-10 and 4:30:1 rear-axle ratio is the least expensive route to towing a 15,000-pound load.
Who could possibly need to tow seven-and-a-half tons, and for cheap? Carnies. How else do you suppose the cotton candy machine, the Spin ’n’ Spew, and rigged ball-toss games end up in the parking lot of your abandoned neighborhood Service Merchandise? Then there are the narcotics runners, their overhead impacted by rising fuel costs, who need to ferry their 38-foot, flat-black go-fast boats around the Keys. And how could Grandma and Grandpa “visit” your driveway with their new fifth wheel if it weren’t dragged there?
The F-250 is happiest towing, and it’s obvious the design bias was placed on making the truck behave with a load in or behind it. Empty, the ride can be a bit bouncy, but we’d hope that with RV-like fuel economy, you’d only use it when appropriate. The 6.8-liter V-10 makes 362 horsepower, but it’s the 457 pound-feet of torque that make the truck ready to drop its shoulder into anything you ask of it. You have to drive a lot of miles to make up for the $6895 premium required by the 6.4-liter diesel engine, but this option makes the F-250 more responsive—quick, even. Not necessarily practical, but all kinds of goony fun.
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