You have it exactly backward. Years ago I had a Ford Econoline pickup. It had by far the stiffest “frame” of any pickup I’ve been in. Just from simple engineering principles if the bed is of a piece with the cab the entire vehicle is at least an order of magnitude stiffer than a body on frame type construction. In high school I drove a '41 Chevy with frame rails about 6" high. Offroad I drove over a small log 7-8" dia at an angle and heard a loud crack behind my head. Rear window was cracked diagonally. On new trucks, around corners and over bumps, these antique frames are constantly flexing. It don’t understand why they are still building them.
A huge advantage of the Econoline was that the rear axle was placed a good distance to the rear of the centerline of the bed, unlike old or new trucks most of which place the rear axle close to the center of the bed. When loading a bed with gravel, bricks or a 350gal water tank, the nose doesn’t point to the sky and become downright dangerous to drive. The Econoline would just squat and become very slow. The only reason I can see that all small trucks are not unibody is that it would be harder to set up a towing system for weights that approach the weight of the truck but this certainly can’t be insurmountable.
not necessarily. you first have to do the additional engineering and certification to meet FMVSS and EPA standards. Then you’re still paying a 2.5% tariff on imported vehicles. and you have to be able to turn a profit on them after all that. generally speaking, you can only make money on low-volume niche vehicles if you can charge premium pricing for them. Chicken tax or no, cheap small pickups would be a total money loser.
I bought my son an old Mazda pickup when he went away to school. Great first college car. Only holds two people so he’s not driving when it’s a group. College kids are always moving stuff so the truck was very popular. Also had a stick transmission so no one asked to borrow it.
I think the one you’re talking about is the old-school cab-over type van, but I can recall seeing slightly newer and larger van-pickup hybrids like this one. I think these were typically used to haul trailers, like horse trailers, and have a little bed in the back where you could crash. (Nowadays there are horse trailers that themselves have human living quarters built into part of them, and some of them are pretty damn luxurious.)
Mine was a '64 I think. Chevy and Dodge had one at about the same time that were similar. Remember the Econoline van? Well the pickup version was identical except right behind your seat was the back wall of the cab. The remainder was a large bed that was a few inches deeper than the normal pickup. Yes, they were all cab-overs with the engine right beside and to the rear of you. You were the first one at the scene of an accident.
and why, exactly, are we supposed to want these kinds of vehicles again?
I’m not really talking about the cab-over design being so great but the joining of the cab with the bed. I’m just saying I don’t understand why everyone keeps making body on frame pickups when there own engineers certainly realize these are real flexy-flyers. At least in cars from 60 yrs ago the body was basically a solid unit but in pickups it is divided in 2.
To illustrate, cut a wood block the thickness of the distance between the bed and the cab then wrap a sheet of sandpaper around it and wedge between cab and bed. Drive around just on city streets for awhile and see what your paint looks like.
Manufacturers of quality cars go to great lengths to make their cars more rigid. When autos had beam front axles the geometry was haphazard because they knew the ladder frames were so flexible that proper suspension geometry was a waste of time and money. I believe Ford had these until a few years ago. Apparently, buyers of pickups don’t care how they behave under stress, so why should manufacturers build something better than is required?
Sorry, I don’t mean to change the subject to unibody pickups.
Automobile manufacturing has ceased in Aus, so no more Aus models are likely. In any case, the ute was a shrinking market share, mostly replaced by things that are perhaps a cross between an SUV and a truck. Or anyway, something bigger.
Of course this is happening to cars too. Most of the automobiles doing drop-off in the morning at the local school are SUV’s
Sounds like the US
Giant Escalade driving 2.5 blocks, to drop junior off at school
Nothing in the vehicle but junior and his backpack
multiply by the other 127 SUV’s pulling in from walking distance away
That’s my major beef with SUVs–they’re trying to be all things to all people and it just does not work. They carry people and their stuff quite admirably and a lot of them have decent towing capacity but they abjectly fail at the main task of a pickup truck, which is to carry a lot of heavy, often very DIRTY stuff wherever you might need it.
My son has an Expedition and it’s pretty capable, to be sure. However, when it comes time for a dump run he’s sensibly reluctant to pile a bunch of wet, dirty, smelly crap in there and that’s the kind of thing that really needs to be taken to the dump. So he had to buy a trailer to supplement the SUV. And yes, the trailer is quite handy for many things but I prefer to be able to just chuck a bunch of filthy shit in the back of the pickup without having to worry about backing a trailer around a bunch of numbnuts at the transfer station. It’s also nice to be able to take the cap off the back if I need to pile it high, and the cap is light enough I can take it off by myself if I have to.
Another anecdatum–I have a big dog, and he’s a PITA in the car. He gets excitable, he rampages around in any area he’s not physically restrained from being in, he stomps on people and runs over other dogs and occasionally gets into snapping fits with them and he hangs into the driver’s area and drools in your ear. He’s really fucking annoying, but he’s ten years old and is never going to stop being the way he is. Oh, he also CHEWS THROUGH SEATBELTS (and leashes, and dog restraints and bungee cords [for some insane reason known only to him]) any time he gets too anxious in the car, which is all the time. I have a rampage cage dog barrier in the back of the Subaru, but having a dog back there limits how much camping gear I can load in and I can HEAR HIM rampaging and whining back there, which is awful on a three hour drive. The pickup is the solution–I pile crap back there and leave room for the dog, I open the side windows with screens so he can’t get out, there are no seatbelts to chew, I can close the slider to isolate myself from his noise and if need be the smaller dog can sit in the jump seat up in the cab where he can’t run over her or pick a fight. In a big SUV where the back seats are needed for passengers a pet barrier isn’t feasible, and he’d be a right asshole in a crate, guaranteed. Again, advantage pickup truck.
Granted, an SUV can handle about 75% of what you need a car or pickup for, but it’s when that other 25% comes into play that you end up cursing yourself for having bought the thing.
In the 1980’s and 1990’s a lot of foreign automobile companies had learned to circumvent the Chicken Tax. They built factories or assembly plants on US Soil, or they sold to the Detroit 3 which brought them in as kits and then assembled them, or brought them in as passenger cars and stripped out the extra passenger parts. Back then it was common to see people packing a bunch of toys, a cooler, the family dog, and even a couple kids in the back and heading off to the beach or park or mountains.
And then, around the time I was in Junior high, I heard about an odd California law. Apparently someone had seen too many dogs (one is more than enough) get bounced out of the back of a pick-up truck on a highway and got concerned that a kid would end up doing the same. So she crafted a law to make it illegal to let a kid ride in the back of a pick-up truck. Then someone got involved in writing that bill and said, “Hey, what about pets?” and eventually the bill that got passed made it illegal to keep a pet in the back of a pick-up truck unless it was tied-in so it couldn’t fall or get bounced out. And the matter about kids had gotten lost in the revisions.
So it took another couple years before California adopted a similar law that was intended to keep kids under a certain weight from riding in the bed of a truck. And then it may have been extended to people of any weight or people of any age.
Meanwhile, the Japanese were making better small trucks to try and capture some of Detroit’s truck market (though they still can’t match the heavy duty beasts that Ford and GM offer with heavier-duty pick-ups) and, in order to capture some of the small truck market, Ford and GM were compromising to reduce prices with Ford putting Mazda B2000 engines in their Ranger small trucks and GM dropping Mitsubishi engines into their Plymouth Arrow and Dodge D50 offerings*. The result, unfortunately, was a bunch of vehicles with truck-shaped bodies that couldn’t handle real truck duties. They did, however, work well for dumping a few toys in the back and heading off to play. And, with the addition of a relatively cheap after-market camper-shell, one could skirt the no-passengers-in-the-bed laws and haul your friends and gear anywhere for an instant party getaway.
After-market camper-shells had been around as accessories for pick-up trucks for a long time. The passage of the laws making it illegal for people to ride in an uncovered truck bed simply gave the camper-shell industry a huge boost. And, since it was easy enough to just leave the shell on a truck and carry around whatever – including people, it wasn’t a big engineering leap to just make a truck with a camper-shell already attached, maybe with built-in passenger seats – even a third or fourth row – that an owner could fold out of the way when it was time to actually haul some construction or lanscaping materials.
By maybe the late 1980’s Sport Utility vehicles were a relatively new product. The ‘extended TV news’ programs featured segments showing how they were essentially pick-up trucks with the camper-shell pre-attached and permanent but, unlike passenger cars or pick-up trucks, the resulting high center-of-gravity made it virtually impossible for them to do a J-turn (135 degrees or more) at more than 30 miles per hour#; showing how they were engineered with the gas tanks dangerously positioned# (the Ford Pinto scare was still fresh in consumers’ minds), how they were designed on a passenger car frame but Detroit had finagled a deal to let them be taxed and CAFE-rated# as light trucks. And then the expose of the exploding gas tank was shown to be exaggerated with the use of special effects in the video footage, so consumers assumed all the hazard warnings about SUVs were just hype#. And the car companies quickly realized the people buying SUVs were basically the same targets who were earlier buying mini-vans (which were derided as gas-guzzling rolling bricks for the YUPPIE generation, which were simply modern Station Wagons of the Boomer generation) and that fit quite nicely with the conspicuous consumption crowd who needed something more luxurious than a simple truck-with-a-shell to haul their kids and krap around to soccer games and playdates. Light-duty pick-up trucks basically got eclipsed by more passenger-friendly SUVs.
And for some reason& our previous concerns about fuel economy and petrol pollution and passenger safety conveniently faded away, even as we were waging war for the right to exploit oil rights. Meanwhile, people who wanted heavier-duty American trucks looked past the wimpy Ranger, D50, and Arrow -type offerings and got real heavy duty trucks with king cabs and team cabs and extended cabs and so on.
—G!
- The Dodge D50 sport truck was the same as the Plymouth Arrow light pick-up truck. Both were actually the Mitsubishi Triton/Forte compact truck, imported and renamed. When I couldn’t find a part for my Dodge D50, the Dodge parts guy told me to head over to the Plymouth dealership and see if they had the same part for their Arrow; that guy sent me to the Mitsubishi place to ask about Triton/Forte parts. I actually ended up getting the part from a Firestone tire/auto maintenance place. I have no idea why they had it in stock but the dealers didn’t.
These issues have not gone away; they’ve just been ‘handled’ with excellent PR/marketing tactics so consumers think they are perfectly safe huge cars.
& Don’t even get me started there. The mods warn me about mixing in too much politics already.
it DOES work, because that’s what people are buying.
They are coming out with a pickup based on the new Jeep Wrangler JL (“Scrambler” maybe). I know they’re producing a 4-door version, but as we know, anything with 4 doors isn’t a pickup, it’s a modified SUV. I’m not sure if they are producing a 2-door version, but I’d sure hope so. My first vehicle was a Comanche, and I loved that damn thing. Loved it into the ground.