How Are Compact Trucks Still a Thing?
When I was a kid, my dad bought the brand new Nissan Frontier LE Crew Cab. This was the first time we saw a compact truck with 4 full doors, it was awesome. The car market is a copy cat league, and soon Toyota, GM, and Ford were doing their crew cab compact truck. The old Chevy S10 became the Colorado and GMC had its Canyon.
These trucks gave us the idea of ruggedness and capability like a full size truck or Jeep Cherokee. The reality was they could only tow a little bit, the interior space was pretty small, and the engines were small. People weren’t getting that full size performance at all, and fuel mileage sucked because the engines were working so hard. The 4 speed automatic transmissions weren’t helping either.
GM put a pause on the Colorado and Canyon for a few years. They had to start from scratch to compete with the Asian trucks, while Ford stopped production all together (insert Airplane joke). In 2015, we saw the newly designed GMC Canyon, and then saw the price. I remember walking around our first Canyon in inventory, looking it over, sitting in it, and realizing you could get a Sierra 1500 SLE for $2,000 more. My coworkers and I looked at each other like, “F*$k that! Give me a Sierra all day.”
With new car prices the highest they’ve ever been, compact trucks exacerbate this fact. A Toyota Tacoma TRD Pro is in the mid $60,000s and a Chevy Colorado ZR2 is low $50,000s. These off road trucks are impressive in their capabilities. Motor Trend wrote an article on the ZR2 and loved that it went everywhere it wanted, and how easily it did it. The hardware in these trucks make them very capable of off-roading on medium to hard terrain. If I’m honest with myself, that’s pretty cool to be able to go just about anywhere I wanted. Unfortunately, I can’t let myself enjoy the thought because I’m flooded with ideas of practicality and value.
The way these trucks are packaged isn’t like SUVs. Today’s compact SUV market is very competitive in their standard features and equipment. Small things like power seat(s), dual climate, heated seats; and big things like sunroofs and 360 cameras drive the SUV world. Compact trucks remain very basic with minimum features. Unless you get a top trim level truck, you’re missing out on the simple things. My main dislike for the compact truck market is space.
I’m only 5-9, when I get my seat to the setting I like, there isn’t a lot of back seat leg room. The Tacoma has a new front seat with shocks, to reduce the bumps for the driver when off roading. Maybe a cool feature (not really), but this makes the seat significantly larger leaving zero leg room for rear passengers (not exaggerating). There is no shot getting a rear facing car seat in the back seat, even for me, in any of these trucks. My Nissan Sentra offers more rear leg room for people than Tacoma, Colorado/Canyon, or Frontier.
If you like the versatility of having a truck bed for moving furniture you bought at the garage sale, I get that, totally valid. I hate to say, the Honda Ridgeline is the truck to get. It has the best rear leg room, a bed for those light payload needs, and practical driving functionality. The reason, because it’s not rugged. The Ridgeline is street oriented for more practical, daily usage. Even still, it’s rear leg room is 4 inches SMALLER than the CRV. A top end Ridgeline is about $7,000 MORE than a top end CRV. This is my point, I can get more space in a CRV, RAV4, Rogue, or Equinox for $7,000-$10,000 less than its truck competitor.
If you’re single or it's just you and your mate, get a Tacoma. If you dirt bike on the weekend, and it’s just YOU, get a Tacoma. If you and your mate like to camp in the middle of nowhere, get a Tacoma. Like Jeeps, these compact trucks can be accessorised with all kinds of cool camping/off-roading gear. If you have kids in booster seats or in elementary school, a Tacoma would work, maybe.
I feel the old Top Gear argument coming out from me, where Clarkson, Hammond and May say how stupid each other’s cars are for their next adventure. “Anyone buying a compact truck must be a schtewpid person (Clarkson impression).” I really do despise the compact truck. If I need the use of a bed, get me a full size truck all day, and a RAM. Worse case scenario, get me a Ridgeline, or take me back in time to my early 20s and get me a Frontier.