The Next Truck

Podcast Episode: 0229
What is next for the Truck market?

​Unlock the secrets behind the transformative journey of pickup trucks, evolving from rugged workhorses to family-friendly vehicles that fit comfortably into suburban life. Discover how the introduction of the quad cab became a game-changer, capturing the 

​hearts of families moving away from minivans and revamping the way we perceive utility vehicles. We'll walk you through the key shifts in consumer preferences that have reshaped the automotive landscape over the past two decades, turning trucks into symbols of adventure for families across the globe.

               Trucks. They're our workhorses. They get the jobs done, they pick things up, they move things around and they're easy to transport things. But why are trucks making such a drastic change today? Today, trucks are seen more than just the workhorses of the world. But why is it happening and what is really next for the truck industry? Where can we go and what can we become? Pickup trucks are with us for a long time and they're going to be here for an even longer time, but its history has been drastically changed in the past 20 years and is about to make another drastic change for the future. Today, AutoLooks is going to take a look at what's next for the truck industry.
 
           Welcome back to the AutoLooks Podcast. I am your host, as always, the doctor to the automotive industry, Mr. Everett Jay, coming to you from our host website at autoLooks.net. If you haven't been there, stop by, check it out, read some of the reviews, check out some of the ratings and go to the Corporate Links website page. Big or small, we have them all on the corporate links website page. On the AutoLooks.net website. The AutoLooks podcast is brought to you by Ecomm Entertainment Group, distributed by PodBean.com. If you'd like to get in touch with us, send us an email over at email at AutoLooks.net. So, like I said in the beginning, pick up trucks. 

                In the past 20 years we've made a major change in the truck industry. All the way up until the late 90s, trucks were seen as only the dedicated workhorses to get us around. Literally, you saw them on farms, you saw them as work vehicles. That's pretty much it. But why do you see more trucks today? My home city has tons and tons of pickup trucks in it. I see them everywhere I go. There are trucks here, trucks there and trucks everywhere. But then when I go to major urban centers like down south, I see them as well. There are more and more pickup trucks everywhere. And this all started around the time I was going to college in the early 2000s. But why was that? There wasn't a major change to the pickup truck industry. There was the introduction of one feature which led to the change in the perception of the truck industry. That was the quad cab. Now the quad cab had been here for a very long time. Four-door pickup trucks had been around since the late 50s. They really started taking off as a commercial work truck by the late 60s and into the 70s and even into the 80s we saw them all over the roads but people never looked at them and said I want to pick up truck to move my family around. So, what changed in the late 90s?
 
       Minivans the minivan market had blown up so much that it had become synonymous with the family mover. But by the late 90s a lot of people were getting sick and tired of having minivans. They were here, they were there, they were everywhere. The front engine, front wheel drive vehicles were now starting to be seen as not as safe as they originally told us. Minivans weren't the world's greatest things in snow. They were shitty going off roads. So, when you went to the bush and had a camp way deep in the bush carrying a ton of people and a whole bunch of stuff, you had major issues.
 
         Well, that's where the SUV craze took off. It started expanding for the backwoods adventurers. People started seeing it as a more versatile vehicle and as more people started to see the SUV world, they started to see the all-wheel drive systems in them. But not everybody wants those. Well, in the late 90s, dodge had this crazy idea. Everybody wanted an off-road SUV. They wanted to go deeper into the bush and Chrysler Corporation being the one who owned Jeep, one of the most profitable SUV companies in the world selling vehicles to the masses, wanted to go one step further.
 
          As the Comanche was gone, jeep didn't want to bring back a pickup truck. Dodge wanted to utilize the Ram to go even deeper. They wanted to take on the suburban industry. With that, more suburbanites were about to realize that pickup trucks would play a pivotal role in the change of the automotive marketplace. Not just for going out into the bush hauling lumber out for your fireplace at home. It wasn't about a vehicle made easy to go out and pick up all the things you needed to build a brand-new deck in your house. People were now seeing them as something more and in my hometown a lot of people still had pickup trucks even when I was younger. 

​             With the small truck market growing during the late 70s and into the 80s, more suburban trucks were starting to appear, more urbanized pickup trucks. Yes, the small truck market brought in from the Asian marketplaces to North America started to bring a more truck market to the masses. But club cab pickup trucks still didn't seem like a great family vehicle. Trust me, I had them. Sitting in the back of a club cab pickup truck is nothing like sitting in the back of a club cab pickup truck is nothing like sitting in the back of a quad cab pickup truck Club cabs. You would sit against the back wall and face the other passenger. You wouldn't be facing the front windshield; you'd be facing the other passenger in these skinny little seats in the back. Well, that wasn't comfortable, even for children it was not comfortable.
 
           Well, the late 90s, a push for more safety in vehicles, really pushed us to look at even the pickup truck marketplace by now having to put child seats in vehicles even for longer. You got to remember I grew up in a generation but by the time you're about two or three you were out of a child seat and sitting in a regular seat of a vehicle. I could sit in the front of a vehicle by the age three. Now my son's 12. He still can't legally sit in the front seat because he doesn't weigh the proper amount. Like seriously, I get it, there's an airbag, but I could turn it off.
 
          So, safety was becoming a concern and companies started to realize oh, there are still people to buy pickup trucks and need to move their family around. Well, dodge said, let's make it a little bit easier to get kids in and out of pickup trucks and brought us the first half-door quad cab pickup truck. They were trying to showcase to the world that these single and club cab pickup trucks are more than just one family member going back and forth to work and being able to haul stuff on a weekend or hell, even just throwing some kids in the back seats to get that boat out to your camp. No, no, no, no, we're going to use these trucks to do even more. But that wasn't enough and it only lasted a short time before everyone else realized hey, we're already selling four full-size door quad cab pickup trucks to the commercial marketplace. What if we start adding that to our standardized products? Hell, four-door pickup trucks have been around Go back to the 80s with the Lamborghini LM002. 

        It had four doors. Hell, little vehicles like little Dacia 1304s had double-cab pickup trucks for four people. They existed. Even all the way back to the 1950s with the double-cab Volkswagen Type 2. They had four doors. They existed. But considering the fact that our fun, smaller trucks we had in North America were the crossover utility trucks like the Ranchero and the El Camino, those never had more than two seats. Our midsize pickup trucks started moving further up the food chain. But even still they never had more than just club cabs. Nobody was doing dedicated quad cabs. By the early 2000s nearly every full-size and mid-size pickup truck in North America and nearly around the world had four doors on it. Even the crossover utility marketplace started moving out of the club cab Volkswagen Saveiros and into the quad cab Volkswagen Saveiros.
 
         General Motors saw the light at the end of this tunnel and said we need to make suburbanized vehicles for people. And then they gave us the birth of the first full-size crossover utility pickup truck, the Chevrolet Avalanche and its sibling, the Cadillac Escalade EXT, not only the first standard quad-cab suburban pickup truck, but a luxury variation of it as well. They gave us a utilitarian version of the truck. Hell Hummer was doing it with the original H1s for the Army, four doors. But you have to remember it's an Army vehicle, similar to that of a commercial pickup truck. It needed to have four full-size access doors because you were fitting four full-size humans inside of it. You weren't fitting little kids in the back. Everybody who bought club cabs only had little kids. They weren't thinking about bringing their friends along. 

​             Well, now pickup trucks, because the market was starting to shrink. The three-car driveway was slowly turning into the two-car driveway. You would now have friends that wouldn't purchase their first vehicle until their mid-20s, where the generation before them, everybody, had a vehicle. My dad and every single one of his friends had a car by the time they were 18. Me, it was 2001.
 
           I started college I didn't own a vehicle. I was going to college. I couldn't afford a vehicle. When I was in college, most of my roommates had cars. One of them only had it for the summer and would put it away in the wintertime. And out of all my friends, only one of my friends had a car. Everyone else didn't, and most of us didn't get our first vehicles until as early as about 23, 24 years of age.
 
         Well, that's now a six-year gap between us and our parents. We're waiting even longer to get our first vehicles. We're going to be looking at vehicles to bring our friends along with us and with that, if we're looking at getting a pickup truck, we don't want these chintzy little club cab seats in the back for our full-size friends. No, we need four full-size doors. Similar to the family man buying a pickup truck, he needs full-size rear seats so they could stick their kids in the back, because these child seats have to stay with them until they're nearly 10 years of age. It's the same reason why the coupe marketplace died out.
 
               How many single cab pickup trucks do you see around the world anymore? Not a lot, and there's not even a lot of them available from car companies. You can find them, they do exist, and out of the big three, all of their full-size trucks still come in single cab formats. They're mid-size trucks. You're lucky to find even one model that comes in a single cab pickup truck in North America. Other places in the world you could find some, but not here.
 
             The truck evolved from being the workhorse to the family vehicle. We added those half-size quad doors and people started realizing oh, we can bring our whole family in the vehicle. They started asking for more amenities inside vehicles. Trucks weren't just a plastic dash with a full-length seat in the front and a tree gear shifter. No, we now wanted cup holders, armrests, navigation systems, full-blown stereos and comfortable seating. Our trucks demanded the same things that the crappy minivans we had before all had. We needed all of this and we needed to fit at least five people inside of it. Hell, only up until a few years ago, pickup trucks were the last remaining vehicle on the road that would have a bench seat in the front, and the only reason why a lot of them still had the bench seat in the front is because they were still made as single cab products. You wouldn't have to change the seating arrangements for specific models. Now you ever wonder that that's the reason behind.
 
             Dodge had that stupid little gear shifter built right in the dash. I hated that stupid little circle thing Because you never know if you're fully on park. You twist at the gear shifter built right in the dash. I hated that stupid little circle thing because you never know if you're fully on park. You twist the park and it's like is it there, can I trust it? And then you get out and it doesn't move. It's like okay, I can trust it because there's no emergency brake. It's like my rav4. It's built in, which I don't like either, because how am I supposed to do power slots? Seriously, I get it, that's truck, but it's more fun to do a little more power slides in.
 
            So, yes, our quad cab pickup trucks were taking over for the SUVs and minivans we wanted to get away from, and with that our trucks started evolving. We started to get more premium and luxury features into pickup trucks. But sure, that was changing and our market was growing, but they still look like trucks. Well, things started to change by the late 2000s when one of Japan’s biggest automakers finally decided to get into the truck marketplace. They gave us north America’s first mid-size crossover utility truck. We had had somewhat crossover utility trucks within the mid-size marketplace, but most of them ran into a full-size place. The mid-size ones we had during the 1980s were the rampages and the you know the four Durango’s, but those were only single cab. This was the first quad cab crossover utility truck in the mid-size marketplace, the Honda Ridgeline, a truck built off of a unibody platform, the same platform that underpinned the Honda Odyssey and Acura MDX. I only know this because early on in the production of the Ridgelines they were built in Alliston, Ontario, alongside the Honda Odysseys and Acura MDXs. 

               Unibody pickup trucks. That is weird. We had seen some of these before when the original Subaru Brats and Subaru Baja were kicking around. We'd heard about unibody pickup trucks from the other side of the world Hell, the Volkswagen, Saveiro, the Caddy Rabbit. They were all the unibody little pickup trucks, but these were more suburbanized runabout trucks. The Ridgeline was something we can actually fit a Honda Quad and dirt bikes into the back of it, had a compartment so that we could store our groceries and still put a load of lumber in the back of it. This was built to be a truck but have the appeal of a more urbanized society. Honda was giving us the evolution of the pickup truck.
 
            Sure, a few years before that, Subaru had attempted this by bringing back their original brat as the Subaru Baja, essentially a legacy wagon with the back cut off of it and turned into a box. It ran in the same lines of the Hummer H2 SUT, an integrated miniature box in a pickup truck. But this never really caught on because the boxes were too small. People don't want tiny little four-foot boxes. I get it, you live in the city but a four-foot box would have the same storage capacity as a full-size SUV. That tiny little box in the Baja sure can hold tall objects, but it still can't hold super deep objects. I can get a brand new snow blower in the back of my Borrego. When I drop the seats In the Baja, I have to leave the tailgate open to do the same thing. So, there's not much more than our SUVs.
 
          This is a problem that Lincoln had when they created the Blackwood Super Crew pickup truck. They created a non-essential box, a pickup truck box that did not work Wood floor, ambient lighting and a hard tonneau cover which could never store anything massive inside of it. I guess luxury world you don't really bring a lot of stuff, but we talked about this in a past podcast, why luxury trucks don't make it. They just don't work. The market is completely different for the luxury pickups and that's why the Mercedes X-Class never made it in the world. But the Ridgeline was not a body-on-frame pickup truck and this would eventually lead to a brand-new classification in the truck marketplace, separating trucks to the crossover utility truck market. Something the electric vehicle industry is starting to bring Now electric trucks is a completely new breed of pickup truck Because the battery pack goes underneath the vehicle. 

          It can essentially put underneath a shell body. It's similar in context to a body on frame design, but the shell on top of it can be a full body similar to that of a crossover utility truck, and that is something that the electric vehicle industry is moving into. You've seen this with Rivian, you've seen this with General Motors and Chevrolet. There's a major issue here and that evolution is built off of commercial planning. Lordstown Automotive tried to buy out the old Lordstown Automotive manufacturing plant from General Motors. They successfully did that and built their pickup truck. They built a new electric pickup truck to go after the marketplace and, unlike the failed workhorse W15 electric pickup from years previous and the Havalar product from Canada, this was one of the first production electric trucks, dedicated electric trucks to hit the marketplace and they did it in a way to go after commercial sales.
 
           One thing the electric vehicle industry to go after commercial sales. One thing the electric vehicle industry has lost is commercial sales. Some companies have realized that commercial success is what breeds brand new pickup trucks. Rivian can sell you as many brands new R1Ts same with the new Tesla Cybertruck as you want, and Chevrolet can push the new Silver Auto EV and tell us it's the greatest freaking thing on the road. But unfortunately, it will never get there because of its integrated design, similar to that of the Ridgeline. Now you may be saying to yourself well, Everett, I've seen the new Ridgeline and the box is separated from it. No, take a closer look at it. The box is actually integrated into the design. The only reason why the cut line is there is because the stamp was not big enough to make an entire length on the side of the vehicle. It's still unibody and fully integrated. But the box, the sheeting on that side, is just an extra stamp outside of the unibody frame. So essentially, it's not a separated box, and that is something the electric vehicle industry is really missing. 

            Crossover utility trucks are great for the suburban marketplace. That is, it. You're not going to find a Chevrolet Silverado EV in the commercial marketplace, because the commercial marketplace is one of the last standing areas where people use trucks as they were initially designed to be. We beat the living crap out of them. I've worked for many different companies in my life Mining companies, farms, landscaping and construction and the one thing I've learned through all of these industries is that pickup trucks in those marketplaces get beat up. They took an original Hummer H1 and put it underground in a mine in Sudbury, Ontario. Within a year they dragged it out of the mine and threw it out.
 
            Toyota is one of the few places you'll ever find the FJ Cruisers still available in North American marketplaces. You'll find them underground in mines and they love these trucks because they literally beat the living crap out of them. The only thing they ever replace when they're underground are the boxes Because you're throwing so much stuff in them and you bang them up and they bang against the wall. Sure, the front of the vehicles can do this too, but they don't take as much abuse as the boxes box by integrating the box into the full design. If it rots out and goes like the original Ridgelines, the truck is completely toast. You got to throw it out. I knew somebody that had one and literally once that started happening, the truck is useless.
 
             Dedicated boxes like on those FJ Cruisers you can replace. I pass by a dealership that's dedicated to just selling truck boxes and the owner of it actually goes to the United States and brings tons of them back from like Texas and Arizona where it's nice and dry and they don't rot out. And he brings them back to my home city because all the mining and construction companies beat the crap out of their trucks and they have to replace the boxes on them every six to seven years because they get beat up so much. But you can do as much as you want for oil spraying and all that to it, but these things are literally going to get beat to crap and going to have to be replaced. That is one thing.
 
           The evolution of the pickup truck is starting to lose. Urbanized pickup trucks similar to the new Chang E07, the Fisker Alaska, the Rivian R1T they're all missing it and a dedicated box needs to be there for commercial use. So, you'll never see something like a Ford Maverick running around as a commercial use vehicle. And if you do see it from a construction company, I guarantee you that vehicle is a supervisor only vehicle. He only uses it to throw small things in the back of it to bring him from construction site to construction site. This is not the workaday vehicle that's going to bring all of your gear, your crew and all of the product to the job site.
 
              Little companies some of them are starting to realize they need to do this. You need to separate the box out. Alpha Motors has realized that with their little Wolf and Super Wolf pickup truck, they need to make it so. The box is completely removable from the front of the truck, even if it's like almost attached. They need to ensure that it can be replaceable or you'll never pick up on the commercial marketplace, something that the Japanese are still lacking in the North American marketplace. Another addition to that is torque. Electric trucks can be deemed as having more power and even more towing capacity than a standard pickup truck. But when it comes to towing over a long period of time, getting the most efficient use out of it, a diesel still beats an electric in the long run because it tows without blowing your dough and, trust me, they do.
 
                   And that is where commercial sales come from, but where the Ridgeline gave us the next evolution to the crossover utility truck market for a more urbanized environment and Lordstown gave us a more futuristic power source for a commercial marketplace. Companies like Canoo, Altis, Alpha Motors and even Kia are showing us even more different routes for our future. Just last year, Geely gave us a brand-new division called Radar, and their truck does not look like a truck. It's similar to the original Samsung Rexton Sports or the Musso. It's more of a unibody, civilized front end with the capability of a pickup truck at the rear. We're starting to make trucks look more acceptable to society, not the brutish force we remember them as. Take a look at the brand-new Santa Cruz from Hyundai. It looks more like an SUV than anyone would buy than a pickup truck. Not everyone is going to go oooo! over the design of a brand-new F-150. But people who live in a major urbanized area are going to go oooo! over a Santa Cruz Hell. The Maverick may be selling quite a bit now, only because there are still dedicated Ford people and they know that Ford builds both the Ranger and the F-150, so they know they're a dedicated truck brand, sort of like Toyota with their brand-new Hilux Champ, a vehicle I wish that would go global with, because an entry-level pickup truck like that would be great in the North American marketplace. 

​            Compact pickup trucks are essentially where the automotive world is going now. As the cost for full-size pickup trucks start exceeding six figures, even for entry level, and even mid-size trucks are growing to being the size of nearly full-size pickup trucks with an entry price at $50,000, we're losing the entry customer Somebody who doesn't have the world's greatest job, the world's greatest pay, lives in a trailer park out in the bush or even just in a smaller house, but still needs a pickup truck to move all their stuff around. They can't afford these big brutish trucks that we have growing on the road and some of them don't need these, so they're looking for something cheaper and smaller, and small is where trucks are going now. It's kind of funny to say in a marketplace like this where everything is bigger than the others. But small trucks are essentially the growth aspect of the truck marketplace. That and crossover trucks, giving us trucks that have greater mobility for the future.
 
          Concepts like the Skoda Mountiaq concept or even the Suzuki Mighty Deck or the Yamaha Cross-Hub concept, tiny little civilized pickup trucks that bring us back to concepts of the 1980s and early 90s, beach trucks and little fun buggies for the back road. The buggy market is starting to grow yet again and growing within the utilitarian side, so the off-road marketplace. But buggies are starting to enter the truck market and, like I said, as trucks are getting smaller, for more entry-level city, not full suburbanized but more urban-placed trucks, little trucks like the Hilux Champ are where trucks are going for the future. We're going to still have our huge Silver Autos and Ram 1500s in the future, but we need little products like the Yomper, the Hilux Champ and, hell, even the Dacia Duster or Roach. We need these little trucks and we need crazy new designs to give us a new face for its future. Even though we don't like the Kia Tasman design, it's still showing us something for the future and, like everything else, the truck market is also seeing the introduction of new power sources. Nikola tried to bring us both the gasoline and hydrogen marketplace to the pickup truck markets. When electricity or gas disappear, we still have a hydrogen source. When our hydrogen runs out, we have alternative fuel sources. Now H2X Global is doing transformations in Australia over Ford Rangers to turn them into hydrogen pickup trucks as well. We're getting changes, new power sources, new designs.
 
        Trucks aren't trucks anymore. Trucks are utilitarian vehicles and as the truck market evolves essentially back to where it came from for a more civilized environment, we're eventually going to grow back into where we started. Where are trucks going? They're going smaller. They're going inwards into the city and escaping the suburbanized marketplace. Whereas in the early 2000s trucks escaped the rural climate and started entering the suburban market, trucks are now going after the most urbanized areas of the world. They're taking over. 

​            But are you ready for a takeover of the truck market? So, tell us what you think about the takeover of the truck marketplace. Do you think it's kind of neat that trucks are evolving to go to a more urbanized environment, or do you really think trucks could just stay in the rural climate place? Give us an email, write in the thread, even share this podcast with all your friends, family and well-wishers about what you think of the evolution of the truck marketplace. What do you think Some of these new trucks are going to fit in? Do you think we need more utilitarian vehicles or should we just stick with the big brutish force that we all know from before? Hell, even evolution vehicles like Neuron and their trucks that can go from single cabs to quad cabs, to even enclosed trailers and become SUVs. Can we have an evolutionary tale of evolutionary style trucks?
 
             Tell us below and follow us and like us to learn more about the AutoLooks podcast from future podcasts and check out some of our past ones. We talked about the follies of the Japanese full-size marketplace and why luxury pickup trucks do not work. Hell. You can even check back and learn a little bit of history about the Ford Ranger, the Ram, the Dakota pickup truck and even playing with lightning how the lightning evolved from a performance truck to the electric one we have today all from the AutoLooks podcast. You can find them all on the AutoLooks.net website and any of the major streaming sites that you've found us on, from PodBean to Amazon music and even Spotify. We are there.  The AutoLooks podcast can be found at every major streaming site from around the globe, big or small.
 
            We're on them all on the AutoLooks.net website and the AutoLooks podcast. So give us a listen, like us, follow us and send us out to all your friends, family and well-wishers and after that, stop by the website, read some of the reviews, check out some of the ratings, go to the corporate links website page and check out the help pages for all the cool little pages that you never even thought were out there help with 3d parts, help with finding new laws about vehicles, new technologies, technologies and, hell, even streetwear From one of our famous counterparts and one of the people that we talked about on a previous podcast, from Foxed Motorsports and Foxed Car Care All on the AutoLooks.net website. The AutoLooks Podcast is brought to you by Ecomm Entertainment Group and distributed by PodBean.com. If you'd like to get in touch with us, send us an email over at email at AutoLooks.net. So, from myself, Everett Jay, the AutoLooks podcast and the AutoLooks.net website, strap yourself in for this one fun wild ride that the evolution of the pickup truck market is going to take us on.
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Everett J.
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