Here is a little tough love from the world of auto sales !
The world does have a fwd pick up. It’s called a minivan. That’s why you don’t see these things. A bed way in the back with loads or in towing means it is a poor driver, not better in snow but worse for both fwd trucks and minivans. To compensate, you need to engineer the rear wheels way out to the rear corners. Hense, you have a very long wheel base vehicle and just another minivan. Little short wheel base fwd trucks have no place in snow. Heck, they couldn’t even sell enough of them by Subaru with the necessary AWD.
I know you guys keep railing about poor traction of rwd pick ups; but that’s because you run around with them in snow with “all weather weenie cookie cutter tires” and no weight in the back like “girly men” do when they are designed for big tread and weight ALWAYS as real work trucks. (AT tires and weight, deal with it) Get off the fwd pick ups. They are for whooses as are all fwd vehicles and not for any one who needs a practical vehicle that can tow and carry heavy loads. Some of us keep yearning for the cheap crappy Rangers and fwd pick ups cause we are cheap, not because we are practical and we want to drive something that looks like a truck.
With the world gone unibody, framed vehicles are expensive to make as the body of all trucks have to be unibody too to pass crash tests. So you are duplicating construction. They cost money which makes them nealy as expensive as full size behemoths which most non truckers deplore driving. The days of cheap Rangers and fwd pick ups are gone for safety reasons.
Man up and deal with it ! ;)))) They will be in AWD or not at all and expensive if you want your little cuddly entry level car based pick up in lavender, mauve, or taupe, you whooses ! Half kidding…of course but not much.
They’ve entirely disappeared. We had to go way back to an 80’s vintage truck to get one small enough for us. Today the Colorado is considered a small pickup. I could almost park my truck in that thing.
And just imagine that 12+/- hp engine is carrying 12,000 pounds on public roads. Whenever you get frustrated that the car ahead of you is driving 55 in a 65 mph zone just be grateful that one of those vehicles isn’t ahead of you.
Rod’s post has reminded me that there are the small pickups I like all over the roads in other parts of the world, just not in the U.S. It makes me wonder how much of a factor our regulations are in the disappearance of small pickups. For the records, I’m not including the ones with the bed-mounted 50mm guns and four unshaven rebels in the bed. I’m thinking of Okinawa, Thailand, and the countless places like that.
small trucks make the average MPG for trucks go up. maybe the car companies want the average to look worse than necessary to limit the effect of regulation and they are saving small trucks for a rainy day, as we have done with domestic oil supplies. I think the day is rainy enough, and the future of alternatives is close enough, for us to use our domestic oil now.
The Subaru Brats were actually FWD vehicles with on-demand 4WD just like the station wagons, etc. They could be shifted into 4WD on the fly without locking hubs and so on.
The engine drove the front wheels and if 4WD was needed a selector lever was pulled which engaged a rear gear set in the transmission extension housing which in turn powered the driveshaft to the rear wheels.
The later Brats have a Dual-Range 4WD and which I have read was accomplished with the use of a redesigned transfer case. That is essentially not true as it makes it sound as though there was a separate unit for this with the same impression being given on the earlier models. The range change was done inside the transmission by splitting the mainshaft.
On the earlier models there was simply another gear set added in the extension housing where 5th gear would normally be on a 5-speed manual.
CAFE standards were changed by corporate lobbyists, @wesw.
the “footprint” was dreamed up as an excuse to allow larger pickups to burn more fuel based on the footprint, or shadow relative to the fuel mileage/footprint of a compact truck.
Really, with appropriate weighting, a RWD is really a decent snow vehicle.
Remember, the hardest thing to do in snow is get the drive wheels to power you up a hill, and uphills favor RWD by shifting weight rearward. Heck, a trick to getting up a snowy hill in FWD is to attack it in reverse!
The only issue with RWD is getting the vehicle to track once wheelspin occurs. That’s a bit like balancing a broom by the handle, only in one-d. It really isn’t too hard, once you learn how to drive.
The advantage to a RWD pickup is the higher ground clearance means you can drive deeper snow before getting hung up on it. “City shut down due to heavy snowfall” really means snow depth exceeds ground clearance on most vehicles, and the heavy wet snow lifts the weight off of the drive wheels and destroys traction.
I’ve got a FWD Cobalt and a RWD F150. My plan this winter is to park the Cobalt and use the truck, outfitted with snows and a bed loaded with eight sacks of concrete that were left out in the rain and solidified.
I had a Mazda B2000, about as close as you can get to a Ranger then and later. I never want to own them again when my Tacoma gets nearly the same mileage with nearly a hundred more horsepower and can tow more then 3 times as much and I use every capability…it can actually go anywhere you dare, is much more roomy and comfy and lots safer. It reality is not a whole lot bigger in 2wd form then a Ranger mk’. The new Colorado and. GMC Sanoma are very much improved and could make you forget about little trucks
That’s the point, @dagosa. The manufacturers put all their R&D into their ever growing high profit behemoths while allowing their less profitable smaller trucks to remain in the technical doldrums. The fuel mileage of the smaller trucks would be comparably lower than the larger trucks if only the same improvements of the larger power trains were incorporated into their design. The fuel mileage and power figures that made the smaller trucks obsoleter were intentional.
I have a 1990 Toyota Pick-up. 22R engine. 200K miles, 4 speed, 2wd standard cab. It does everything I want to do and more and gets 30 MPG. I’d LOVE to have a newer one with power steering and a 5-speed…
Toyota still sells a Tacoma with a regular cab, stick, and short bed. However, it doesn’t sell very well. Go to any Toyota dealer and you’ll hardly see any of those on the lot. Most of them are quad cab, or at least extended cab, and mostly with fat rims and tires
I agree @Rodknox. The major players in American brand trucks just sat back and reaped the benefits of the big truck profits without making smaller more economical ones. Toyota just made the Tacoma better to swallow up more sales, selling more then the rest combined by improving their lot 10 years ago while others from Ford and Chevy did little. Now, 10 years later, Tacomas have the same motor, same basic truck, same poor mileage but better then others and just kept adding electronic gizmos to keep cell phone users and digital music lovers happy. They did little to improve the truck since 2005.
Tacoma has been the only real player in this market. Now, chevy/GMC has updates…but. They are so far behind, real movement is still years away. At the least, everyone is talking 35 mpg from small truck diesels in a couple years which everyone is looking at. Why ? Mandates…finally. But, for a trimmed up model, they are over 30k and thanks to the consumer, no one is making a small standard cab; all crew and extended. Part with your wallets!
Here is the big kicker. I just bought a truck and I wanted the smallest they make for 2015. Are you ready ? The smallest has a 127 inch wheel base because consumers with their fat asteroids won’t buy anything smaller to ride in. They are comfy for a truck, but terribly expensive and a turning radius that would embarrass a limo. The market has spoken and all small trucks are just slightly smaller behemoths. The standard regular f150 WB is 125 inches. So the standard small truck is now longer then the standard big truck. Go figure !
Btw, 2014 is the last model year Toyota sells the standard cab. Now, as of sales year 2015, the access cab with a 127 inch WB is the smallest Tacoma you can get here in the States.
@Caddyman, I had the exact same truck. Last of the 2-bbl carbs. I had mine up to 325,000 miles, but a retaining wall stopped my dreams of hitting a half-million miles. To me, the latest model Taco is much bigger that the old Hi-lux models.
