are small trucks gone?

[IndyIan]

Originally Posted By: Quattro Pete
Originally Posted By: antiqueshell
It is pretty clear that there IS a significant market for small pick ups

The market you're speaking of would expect to pay significantly less for a small truck vs. a large truck. But as was pointed out many times in this thread, this is the though part these days as manufacturers are unable to deliver on that expectation. Manufacturing and part costs are what they are, regardless of truck size.

If you put two trucks side by side on a sales lot, a small one and a large one with roughly the same sticker price, guess which one will get chosen majority of the time?


There are some easy cost saving though, an inline 4 or 5, manual trans, 2 trim levels instead of 6, no aluminum beds. 1/4 less weight in raw materials has to add up as well.
Some how the small tractor manufacturers manage to make tractors of all sizes with similar complexity, and the prices do lower significantly for smaller machines.
I was hoping Mahindra would break into the market and be happy and profitable selling 20,000 trucks a year, just to show that it could be done.

 

[expat]

Originally Posted By: Quattro Pete
Originally Posted By: antiqueshell
It is pretty clear that there IS a significant market for small pick ups

The market you're speaking of would expect to pay significantly less for a small truck vs. a large truck. But as was pointed out many times in this thread, this is the though part these days as manufacturers are unable to deliver on that expectation. Manufacturing and part costs are what they are, regardless of truck size.

If you put two trucks side by side on a sales lot, a small one and a large one with roughly the same sticker price, guess which one will get chosen majority of the time?



You could make the same argument for cars.
But many people DO buy the smaller car.

 

[Spazdog]

Originally Posted By: Quattro Pete
Originally Posted By: antiqueshell
It is pretty clear that there IS a significant market for small pick ups

The market you're speaking of would expect to pay significantly less for a small truck vs. a large truck. But as was pointed out many times in this thread, this is the though part these days as manufacturers are unable to deliver on that expectation. Manufacturing and part costs are what they are, regardless of truck size.

If you put two trucks side by side on a sales lot, a small one and a large one with roughly the same sticker price, guess which one will get chosen majority of the time?



In the late '70s, the Ford Courier was only a couple hundred dollars less than an F-100. That's it. Just a couple hundred less. You make your Courier a 2.3 with a long bed and you are probably over a 300L6/3spd F-100.

Ford sold plenty of Couriers. So many that they developed their own line of small pickups.

GM did the same with the LUV (Isuzu). Chrysler with the D50 (Mitsubishi)

The seemingly continuous fuel crises of those days probably created a lot of those sales.

Mahindra finally gave up on their small diesel pickup in the US. Maybe GM will start to import the Tornado/Montana next time gas is near $5.00 a gallon.

 

[Quattro Pete]

Originally Posted By: Spazdog
Maybe GM will start to import the Tornado/Montana next time gas is near $5.00 a gallon.

That's the thing. If price isn't much different between small and large truck, what will drive sales is better fuel economy of the smaller truck. But as long as gas is cheap, buyers won't care about fuel economy.

 

[CrawfishTails]

This is why rednecks should not be allowed to own cutting torches:

 

[CrawfishTails]

Still, the last generation (not the current larger one) Chrysler mini-van kinda makes a style statement: