The pickup is as ubiquitous in America as the cheeseburger and hot dog. It’s a vehicle with nearly endless versatility from work and hauling to taking the kids to school. There have been many awesome pickups built throughout history, but what pickup truck is the greatest ever made?
It’s hard to pick any one pickup as the greatest. Old pickups dripped with style and featured weird ideas. New pickups have clever technology and some can even power your home after a power outage. Others have interiors ripped out of luxury cars.
I’m partial to the small trucks of old like the Ford Ranger, small simple, useful trucks.
It didn’t have several cows worth of leather or any fancy trailer loading technology. You got a truck that looks like the pickups you drew as a kid. I’ve moved apartments with old Rangers and their beds will happily swallow whatever you throw into them.
Rangers are also pretty great when the road runs out. I had an 2000 4x4 Ranger with a 4.0-liter V6. It was practically unstoppable off-road, only getting stuck when I tried to take on more than my crappy tires could handle. The truck served me well, failing to die even after I did burnouts and jumps and covered thousands of miles.
My next Ranger was a 1997 with a gutless 2.3-liter four, manual transmission and two-wheel-drive.
This one was not nearly as good off-road, but it was a bulletproof daily driver that scored 30 mpg on good days.
But is the old Ford Ranger the greatest of all time? There are hundreds of options, maybe thousands. And not just from the US, either. Everywhere there are cars, there are pickup trucks.
What do you think is the greatest pickup truck of all time?