Bring On the Mid-Size Truck Wars!

by Collin Woodard

In America, where the F-150 seems like it sells more units than every other vehicle out there combined, pickup trucks are pretty much everywhere. It doesn’t even matter how much money people have. They all want at least one truck. Heck, when I was in high school, the guy who parked next to me either pulled up in a black CLS550 or a white F-250. You know, because those are both perfect vehicles for 17 year old guys overwhelmed with testosterone and a need to impress the ladies.

Over the past few years though, much like most cars, trucks have gotten bigger and bigger. Unlike cars, however, trucks were already big, so now, if you want to drive your new Silverado, you need to make sure you brought your own step ladder just to get in, and you better hope another truck doesn’t catch you crossing a narrow bridge because there simply won’t be room enough for the both of ya’.

*cue snake rattle*

For the owner who doesn’t need to haul a horse trailer or carry more than a few bags of concrete, the mid-size truck has historically been the cheap, reliable utility vehicle of choice. You might not have been able to stick your ATV in the bed of a Ranger, but a 1983 Kawasaki KZ305 fit a lot better than you might have expected, and when you weren’t busy doing truck stuff, you could still probably your fuel economy to be better than 6 mpg.

Sadly, while there used to be quite a number of mid-size trucks to buy, almost all of them have been axed. The Ranger? Gone. The Colorado and the Canyon? Gone. The Dakota? Gone. The Raider? It never really was, but that’s gone too. There are a lot of factors that went into that happening, but one of the biggest ones is that the Tacoma has been absolutely dominant in the segment, with its only surviving competitor, the Frontier, selling fewer than half as many units in 2013.

Clearly Toyota’s been onto something for a while with the Tacoma, so when I found out that the Atlanta fleet was getting one, I tricked them into loaning it to me by asking nicely. After a week with America’s best selling mid-size pickup truck, what was it like?

In a word, it was refreshing.

The vehicle that was dropped off in my driveway wasn’t some four ton behemoth with adaptive cruise control, multiple suspension settings, tailgate speakers, and seats wrapped in bejeweled sheep skin. It was just a truck. It was a double cab, four wheel drive truck that didn’t try too hard to be anything that it wasn’t, and that was awesome.

Was it perfect? No, it wasn’t perfect. The seats could have been a little more supportive, a few of the interior pieces could have been higher quality, and the six cylinder engine desperately needs an update to keep up with some of the full size trucks that now get much better fuel economy than they used to.

That said, for someone looking for some extra utility and not something that can pull a train, it’s still hard to beat the Tacoma. Driving it definitely felt like I was driving a truck, not a car, but it was still quite comfortable. Even better, I could drive it down a two lane road without having to worry that I was about to have a front end collision with every single passing vehicle. Since it wasn’t wider than a school bus like every other full size truck on the market today, that also meant that I could safely drive it into the city to visit a friend when I wanted to.

Driving on Atlanta’s city streets, I was amazed at how much less awful they felt from behind the wheel of a truck. Overall, Atlanta has better roads than most cities in the US, but if you hit the wrong street, especially in the wrong neighborhood, in a sports car, good luck not herniating a disc. In a truck though, you may as well be on a magic carpet ride because those potholes and giant metal plates don’t matter one bit. Sure, a Ram 1500 would probably be just as comfortable doing the same thing, but you’d have to snap off its side mirrors just to make it past oncoming traffic, and that’s no fun at all.

Yes, the vehicle I had came with four wheel drive, but it wasn’t a TRD model, so I wasn’t going to try throwing it at anything more difficult to handle than those roads. After a lot of exploring, I did manage to find a dirt road, which the Tacoma also did wonderfully on, but do you know how hard it is to find a dirt road these days? If you don’t actually own a farm, you practically have to know someone who does if you want to go anywhere that isn’t paved these days. If you really must know, I was able to drive down the dirt road, but it wasn’t like that particular road was challenging or anything.

That may seem like a low standard for a truck, but I can’t really imagine too many people doing more with a mid-size pickup than driving on some rough roads, maybe going down a dirt road, and occasionally driving out into a field. A truck like that will probably be used mostly by young guys to drive to Chipotle with their bros, and as any bro knows, most mid-size trucks punish you pretty badly for not calling shotgun the second you guys declare a burrito run. The double cab Tacoma isn’t going to rival the S-Class for legroom, but I sat behind myself with several inches between my knees and the seat, which means four bros should be able to make a Chipotle run quite comfortably. There will even be room for all their drinks because the Tacoma has approximately 37 cupholders. Seriously. It has all the cupholders.

The bed isn’t going to fit an entire room’s worth of furniture, but if you’re trying to move, I don’t know why you wouldn’t just use a minivan. Minivans were made for moving things. Short of needing to transport an entire living room though, the bed proved useful for basic pickup truck things. You could put a cooler of ice cold beer back there while you drive out to a party in a field and still have room for a long legged girl to dance on the tailgate in her cutoff jeans while you kick back and pretend you totally know who Waylon Jennings is.

Mostly though, a week with the Tacoma got me excited about what’s next. The 2014 Toyota Tacoma is proof that it’s still possible to build a good truck that doesn’t have its own gravitational field, but Toyota has a new Tacoma in development, and by the time it hits the streets, you can expect it to be much more than just a refresh of a refresh. There’s about to be a new Colorado and a new Canyon, and those are expected to be much better than they were last time around. Nissan has a redesigned Frontier coming after that, and there have even been rumors of a Dodge Dakota revival. Who knows? Maybe Ford could even get pulled into selling the Ranger again.

For a segment that has gotten pretty boring lately, things are about to get a lot more exciting, and that can only lead to better vehicles. Remember when the mid-size sedan market started heating up? The competition got fierce fast, and as a result, the mid-size sedans on sale today are leaps and bounds better than they were just two generations ago. In two generations, who’s to say that mid-size pickup trucks won’t be what most American truck owners are buying?

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