Comparison Tests
Americans have places to go, work to do, home improvements to haul, horse trailers to tow, craggy mountain slopes to hunt. Yeah, and while we're at it, happiness to pursue and money to burn. For all that we do, or hope to try before we die, the four-wheel-drive pickup has become the great enabler.
Yahoo!
Only one question: Which pickup?
To help us audition the candidates, we enlisted the counsel of a guy who has been driving pickups for 42 years, starting with a 1950 Studebaker three-quarter ton. In Sedona, Arizona, Marvin James is the Cal Ripken Jr. of building contractors, nonstop since 1967. These days, his crewmen step lively when they spot his red Dodge Ram 4x4. Still, his loyalties are unpredictable. Over the 15 years before the Ram, he'd saddled up a Ford F-150, followed by three Nissans in a row.
Pickups really are as American as Samuel Colt's six-shooter. The nation's perennial top-selling model did it again in 2001 as Ford delivered 911,597 copies of its F-150. No surprise for second place, either, as Chevrolet counted out 716,051 full-size Silverado pickups. The Dodge Ram, boosted onto the top-10 list by its macho makeover of the mid-'90s, was seventh. Clearly, trucks move the economy as much as they move our gear. The question remains: Which pickup?
Some years back, the pickup driver's lament was succinctly expressed to us as follows: "Everything I got is either wet or stolen." The extended cab brings lots of dry, lockable space. It has revolutionized pickup usefulness, making it the obvious choice for a growing number of buyers.
Same for four-wheel drive. Contractor James allows that he rarely needs all-wheel traction on his job sites, but his pickup works on weekends, too, lugging stuff into the wilderness for hunting and fishing expeditions, or hitched up to the boat. Now that most four-wheelers have independent front suspensions, they're reasonably civilized over the highways. You can mess that up with a chorus of extra-knobby tires, of course, but most folks know better. That leaves extra cost as the big barrier to all-wheel traction. You get some of that back on resale. But bottom line: If you see a pickup as your enabler for adventures you haven't yet imagined, paying extra for four-wheel drive is your insurance that you won't have to turn back before you say, "It's time." As for pickup choices, they don't stop with the alternative drivelines. For even more dry, lockable space, most makers now offer full four-door cabs. And all offer the choice of a short or long box behind.
Don't go too long, James advises. Among truck lovers, long-box four-by-fours with four-door cabs strut the right stuff on the road, but their extended wheelbases (15 inches more, plus or minus) hobble them off-road; they get high-centered too easily. They're not much fun to dock at the strip mall, either. So for this test we settled on what we see as the most broadly useful configuration, which is the "extended-cab, short-bed" pickup. We tried for base V-8s, too, and a similar package of options on all candidates, but like buyers everywhere, we can't always find what we want.
Pickups go way back. Your author rode many a boyhood mile watching gravel blur past gaps in the floorboard of his dad's '35 Ford. Improvements evolved at a glacial pace. Until the '90s. Then in 1994—bam!—Dodge turned loose its muscular new Ram, wearing radical, big-truck styling and an upsize cab that leapt far ahead of the others in comfort and space for gear. Buyers went for the Ram in record numbers. The truck business changed immediately. Since then, each time a pickup gets a redesign (Ford in 1996, GM in 1999), it surges past all of its competitors to new highs in user-friendliness of its cab.
Now the cycle repeats as the Ram is all-new for '02. Remember, the choices aren't just Detroiters now. Toyota barged into the full-size-pickup arena with its all-new Tundra for 2000. So here's the question: Can this all-new Ram outflank the competition and get back on top?
Only one way to find out. We rounded up the latest from each automaker, staked out a few hundred square miles in the middle of Arizona as our testing ground, brought in a pickup veteran to serve as our native guide, and drove the heck out of the four trucks you see on these pages.
Try not to choke on our dust.
