Road Test
Toyota picked the soggy wilderness east of Anchorage, Alaska, for the summertime introduction of its redesigned Tacoma pickup. Bad move. We were so busy looking up at bald eagles, slushy glaciers, and misty waterfalls that we forgot to look sideways at the company's new truck. Except for a few flattened mosquitoes, the notebook pages remained bare. So we asked to drive one back to Los Angeles. After 4000 miles, surely our hyperbole would be hemorrhaging, our gerunds budding, and our metaphors raining in sheets.
Toyota gave up a Double Cab 4x4 V-6 six-speed painted "Manischewitz red" and equipped with the Toyota Racing Development Off-Road package, plus a highway atlas of North America and Mexico. That was wise, since our trip planning amounted to watching a few episodes of Northern Exposure, a 1990s TV serial about kooky Alaskan villagers hiding from the hubbub of modern life.
On our drive we learned that Alaska is basically full of kooks hiding from the hubbub of modern life. We also learned that the new Tacoma is definitely a Toyota. In other words, it has keep-it-sane styling, adequate power, extreme refinement, and straightforward controls situated right where fingers are trained to find them. And it feels built to outlast all the ice in Glacier Bay, which could be at least four or five years.
As they say in Tuntutuliak, if the customers want seal meat, don't bring back a walrus. The Tacoma serves up the winning Toyota recipe by the bucketful. Yet, the truck, which isn't assembled in Tuntutuliak or even Tacoma but in Freemont, California, is thoroughly reborn. It's longer, wider, roomier, smoother, and a whole bunch of other -ers, including heavier and pricier. Although prices were not announced before deadline, Tacoma stickers will assuredly climb a few percent across the extensive mix-'n'-match catalog of cabs, pickup boxes, and powertrains when the truck arrives in dealerships this month.
There are three cabins: the two-door regular cab; the larger Access Cab with two rear-hinged half-doors; and the big billy-bob limo, the four-door Double Cab. The two pickup boxes, with their inner walls and floor now formed from nonrusting, nondenting sheet-molded composite plastic-no need for a bed liner-are 60.3 inches and 73.5 inches long. The former is available only on the Double Cab. Four tie-down cleats rated for 220 pounds each slide on rails, and D-rings bolted through the box will take 440 pounds each. Dealer add-ons include bicycle clips, cargo dividers, and a tailgate fence that extends the bed floor.
Payload capacities drop about 100 pounds, probably because the front-disc, rear-drum brakes already must cope with higher curb weights. But max towing capacity rises 1500 pounds to 6500 with a V-6 and towing package.
