The design is bad. The front trunk is a bad use of space, and the Japanese figured this out decades ago with the Kei truck. If you want to see real utility, look at this design.
From caranddriver with no sign-in requirement.
Apart from its digital gauge cluster that also serves as the rearview camera display, power locks, cruise control, and a forward-collision-warning system with automated emergency braking, the Truck offers little in the way of luxuries.
Sounds nice. I do like highway lane following, but not essential.
What I would love to see for a pickup like this is a rentable battery slab you could drop into the bed and temporarily boost the mileage for longer trips.
Completely fabricated for the sake of fundraising.
Oh fuck. Where buy
Am I reading this right and it only offers 1000lb towing capacity? Isn’t that kind of utterly useless?
I don’t need a truck, but this is perfect for people who want to take a bunch of mountain bikes out to the downhill mountain bike park. Throw 5-6 bikes in the back, take the riders in a separate car.
That said, I hope they come out with a smaller wagon or sedan with clearance (so a hitch can be installed for mountain bikes).
I didn’t need a truck back when I bought an Isuzu pickup. But it was the cheapest new vehicle at the time and did come in handy. Didn’t even have power steering or brakes.
Equivalent towing capacity of a Chevy Impala, so yes.
This is less of a truck and more of a truck-shaped go-kart.
Yeah, for towing that’s basically useless unless you’re only using it to tow around a wood splitter or something.
That said, my family has had a 1993 Ford ranger for many years. I’m pretty sure even with the 4-cylinder engine it still has a towing capacity several times that much, but we have never towed anything with it. We have gotten a lot of use out of it as a truck though, moving furniture, camping gear, small loads of firewood, trips to the hardware store, etc.
I can also potentially see this being big for certain fleet vehicles. Growing my dad worked on a military base as a civilian in their wastewater treatment plant. Part of his job involved driving around the base once a day or so to take water samples from a couple places. The public works department had a couple small trucks, Chevy S10 I think, that he’d use for that. They got used by other public works employees, never for anything particularly heavy duty but they did occasionally tote around some bulky tools, equipment, materials, but a significant amount of what they used them for could probably have used a golf cart. I’d be amazed if those trucks went 10 miles most days, they sat most of the time, kind of a perfect sort of situation for them to sit on a charger.
Ranger fam unite! 4cyl towing is only 3500 I think. Less than a car+trailer because that’s what people always ask about in the ranger community. And that’s with the proper frame hitch. The bumper is like class 2
It does only have the bumper, I’ve never looked into it because we’ve never needed to tow anything. We have the long bed so anything we’ve ever needed to haul fit in there just fine.
I love that truck. It has yet to hit 100k miles because until the last couple years my parents had 3 vehicles and especially now that they’re retired they never really go anywhere anyway.
And for a 32 year old truck, it still gets pretty decent gas mileage, pretty damn close to 20mpg, the new rangers don’t beat that by much.
It’s not without its downsides, it’s rwd so it’s kind of shitty on anything but dry pavement unless you have some weight in the bed, and it’s 0-60 time is probably best stated as “eventually,” but it’s done everything I’ve ever needed a truck to do.
If Ford came out with basically that exact truck with a modern engine to get better gas mileage but otherwise kept the performance the same, it would probably be my next vehicle. Wouldn’t mind AWD/4wd too but I could live without.
I really like the maverick but the small bed is kind of a deal breaker. I’ve heard some rumors that they may add a midgate in a couple years to open the bed up into the back seat so if they do that I’m probably sold.
My 98 has the 2.5 Lima/Pinto, the slightly larger version of the 2.3 in your 90s Ranger, and consistently hits 21mpg on 50mph highway with traffic lights. My buddy with a 94 2.3 also gets about 20. However, I’ve read lots of good things about the 2.3 Duratech/Mazda L that started in 01. I just picked up a 2008 in much better condition but have yet to check the fuel economy. It’ll be interesting going from a clapped out long bed to a short bed with a hard tonneau and a bedrug liner. But, realistically, I’m driving empty 95% of the time so I’ll take the cover for a little extra aero.
I’ve looked at the maverick as well. The price (of any newer car) is the main reason I went with an old ranger. That’s neat about the midgate, I hadn’t heard about that. While the 4ft bed of course reduces cargo space, my main concern is about long lumber. With an adjustable tailgate angle and bed pockets for cross boards giving it 6ft of support, the community seems perfectly happy with it for 8ft goods. That’d be awesome if a midgate fit 4ft wide goods through it, almost containing 8ft from rear seats to tilted tailgate. And a 40mpg hybrid? I’m in… Except for the price right now.
Just as an FYI, aerodynamics can be a little complicated, it depends on the exact vehicle, the speeds you’re going, etc. but there’s a lot of cases where a tonneau cover will actually hurt your mpg.
Price is definitely the thing holding me back from a new vehicle as well, even though the maverick is one of the more affordable trucks out there it’s still too rich for my blood. I have a friend who just got one though, so I plan on using him as a guinea pig for the next few years until a new car is hopefully in my budget.
Oh, not at all. Not at all. Now as a full-fledged TRUCK, and hauling, yeah it’s pretty pathetic. But the truck platform that this uses is clean, simple, and fucking brilliant.
A lot of non-truck city people like to cite some damning statistic, something-something-87% of truck owners haven’t hauled anything significant in the past year. Correct, and I think most people simply don’t have that need. The number of oversized trucks I see, that go from home to cubicle work to WalMart & back home again… 🙄🙄🙄
Full-sized trash cans don’t fit in a car very well. But they fit nicely in a truck. This truck can “haul”…all kinds of bulky, awkward shit that doesn’t weigh much. I’ve got a lot of that in my life.
I could use this as a nice, basic farm shuttle vehicle. Chores. Daily driver to & from work. Camping even, obviously light tent camping. Drive-in movie theaters. Parties. “I don’t have room in my car for [junk] .” Well, throw it in my truck. Problem solved, yay 🥳
It’s electric, so you could even drive it part-time & fully recharge it with the fucking sun.
I adore the standard cab, small, working man’s truck. It is not kind of utterly useless, it just doesn’t allow you to be the manliest man that ever manned, bro. Lift kit & shoxxx for offroading, bro. Best in class for towing, bro. Extended cab, bro. It runs on endangered species of owls, bro. …you can keep all that. I’ll take this. 🤗
Fair enough, I guess I’ve been considering my own use case, which is moving lumber.
Wouldn’t you put the lumber in the bed instead of on a trailer?
Lumbar can easily get longer than a truck bed.
Full-sized trash cans don’t fit in a car very well. But they fit nicely in a truck. This truck can “haul”…all kinds of bulky, awkward shit that doesn’t weigh much. I’ve got a lot of that in my life.
Yep, furniture especially. A Queen-size bed is bad enough, but at least you can tie that onto the roof of most sedans. A table and some chairs? Some dressers? Doesn’t matter how light they are, you run out of space real quick, and that’s assuming you’ve got your Luggage Tetris skill maxed so you can cram everything in perfectly.
…or you could just set it all in the bed and put a net over it if you really wanna make sure it won’t go anywhere. I know which one I prefer.
my trailer weighs like 350lb total, that gives me 650lb to haul in it still
If you need to tow something, sure. The vast majority of people who own a pickup don’t tow jackshit. That goes for urban and rural areas.
And this will not fit all requirements of all people all the time. Nor does it intend to. But my god, trucks are such a practical platform & they used to be a lot smaller. The Asians do the tiny utility trucks…so well. But noooooo, Americans simply can’t have anything small, or affordable, we won’t allow small trucks to enter market. 🙄
It fits most cases, and a change 60-75% in the right direction is better than a 0% change in the right direction, cranking out oversized & overpriced trucks that don’t fit our lifestyles.
There are lots of men not entering relationships, lots of couples not having children. This is perfect for daily living & daily tasks. Long-distance trips? Fuck no. But how often are you doing that? Price is right, if it’s cheap-running & simple & reliable – what are we waiting for?? Let’s go, the Toyota Stout isn’t coming to save us anytime soon. Let’s go with this tiny truck until then.
I have an older Ranger. I don’t do much truck stuff. The bulk cargo area is the draw, not the weight capacity. The heaviest load I carried was 800lbs of plywood, which was 15 sheets or something. I have a 4x8 trailer that can also help haul bulky household goods for moves, a motorcycle, lumber, or furniture. While the trailer is rated for 1700lbs payload and weighs 300lbs itself, I have never put more than 500lbs on it, despite filling the 4x8 floor stackef 4ft high. I made the trailer before getting the Ranger, so now they’re redundant and never actually hauled together.
If you’re already towing, this probably isnt the truck for you. If you aren’t towing, it provides an option to tow something if you have to. The reason I chose the Ranger is because it’s cheap, gets good fuel economy, and has the capacity to grab full lumber sheet goods on my commute home. While I could find a 30mpg car for the same price, I’m still in the mid 20s. Maybe I could spend 30k on a newer F150 V6 and get similar, but then it costs 10x what I paid. Bulk space and handling scratchy cargo is the main goal. I think of the Slate as being what the Ranger should’ve been now.
Fair enough
The msrp of this truck is $28000. For having nothing in it that is absurd. Not to mention the rebates put it at 20k but you still have to pay upfront which deters most people from getting. Overall shit truck, shit design, shit price.
I want one. The ONLY thing that would stop me is the rear-wheel drive. We get a lot of snow and rear-wheel and snow are not compatible.
See, tariffs work!
/s
5ft bed and auto high beams, no thanks
Reminds of the first VW Beetle under fucking Hitler. One color, black. I wish Toyota would introduce their Hilux Champ to the North American market.
The Hilux is a perfect example of why tariffs won’t work the way Trump wants them to. The Hilux is not offered to the North American market because a retaliatory tariff applied over 60 years ago due to a trade dispute involving chicken (it is now known as “the chicken tax”) the original reasons for which are largely forgotten to modern consumers, yet the tariff has remained in place ever since. Rather than incentivizing the makers of trucks like the Hilux to move production to the US to bypass the tariff, instead the market for such trucks simply vanished, and manufacturers never bothered investing any effort to bring it back, because… why would they? There’s no profit in it for them.
The tariff hangs over the entire product category like a sword of damocles. Nobody will import them here, because they would need to be specially customized to meet domestic regulations and customers won’t pay for the tariff on the imports nevermind the redesign, so all they would be left with is a bunch of unsellable prototypes . And since there’s no way to test the viability of their products in the market, nobody can make a case to invest in building them here either, because the tariff could be gone tomorrow and they would instantly be put out of business by cheaper imports of the rich variety of light cargo vehicles used throughout the world. The tariff creates an insurmountable risk/reward mismatch that no sane company can ignore.
You can argue and nitpick about economics all you want, the proof is in the economy itself. If you think tariffs work, go ahead and buy a Toyota Hilux. I’ll wait. Some people have been waiting 60 years. It still hasn’t happened. And it’s not going to.
Gross. Cars are a dead end for humanity.
We need hover boards. Though I’ve been told they don’t work on water.
If this post was on Reddit I’d write it off as a troll lol
Want!
There’s no radio, no Bluetooth, and no speakers of any kind beyond for those required to play basic warning chimes.
Many will consider this a cost-cutting step too far, but the interior was designed for ease of upgrading, with easy mounting space for anything from a simple soundbar to a full sound system.
There’s an integrated phone mount right on the dashboard, but there’s nothing stopping you from bringing something even larger. I expect the low-cost Android tablet and 3D-printing communities to have a field day coming up with in-car media streaming solutions.
This is 100% it.
All I want is a modular car system. Everything modular. Dashboard. Body panels. Whatever. I want 3+ cars possible on one frame, and to not need anything more than basic tools to swap parts around.
You wanna drive a FOSS OmniMech and so do I
I do. I really do.
Gm said they’d build a sled drivetrain that they could just plop bodies on top of but that never happened sadly.
Wonder why? Seems to me like a money printing machine for them, the factory and non- factory repair shops and the aftermarket.
Unless it’s seen as a way to hide your car from illegal activities, which well now that I think about it is probably the reason they didn’t follow through with the idea.
Probably a balance between it would make it cheap for them to produce, but also bring down the barrier to entry for third party manufacturers to compete with them.
It’d cannibalize part of the market for their higher-priced offerings. Same reason Toyota dropped Scion and GM dropped Saturn.
framework truck😭
If only that money wouldn’t be partially going into the pockets of Bezos, it would be amazing.
And while easily replacable panels and such are a good thing. Having the mounting screws exposed like that is a horrendus idea. Because I suspect I know what much younger and very drunk people would do, based on the Mercedes hood ornaments I have in a box somewhere.
I don’t really see a downside to this, so why not line Bezos pockets if he is providing¡g a sane alternative?
Getting closer to what I want, which is a reasonably sized and priced EV truck built for actual utility. I’m ok with it leaving out all the extras that I don’t need, and hopefully that means it isn’t also going to be tracking people and harvesting their data.
My biggest objection to the truck itself is that it’s still trying to look like an ICE truck. There’s no engine in front, you could easily slide the cab forward a bit to make room for a larger bed. I would much rather have a tiny frunk and an 8 foot bed, even if it means making the whole thing slightly longer. It’s shorter than a corrolla, so it’s not like they couldn’t add a little length to the design if necessary.
Bezos being involved is also a massive turn off, but than I’m not sure who is going to go into mass manufacturing EVs without some rich asshole funding it.
I love cab over trucks but the one thing I have experienced is the ride quality difference between an unloaded cab over and an unloaded pickup truck. The pickup wins every time due to physics. I think the other two reasons for them to pick an ICE truck look would be the limited space for covered/enclosed storage (not much of any in a cab over) and customers being used to that look. Look at the Canoo EV. That think checks all my boxes for design but is expensive and caked in features that I don’t care about.
This is a small truck. To meet safety standards without adding a lot more cost and weight, you need that front end space for a crumple zone.
