It’s hard times befallen the compact-pickup enthusiast. Unless you’re ready to import a kei truck, you have been cast aside by the almighty market, which wishes for enormous full-sizers, and mid-sizers that are just the size of full-sizers twenty years ago.
What’s left?
Well, with the Frontier gaining weight to match the contemporary Tacoma you get the latest crop of the Honda Ridgeline/Explorer Sport Trac segment of compact pickup trucks? Want to replace the bed? Interested on the standard 6-foot length? Buy something larger and hope it fits your needs. The compact pickup flag is now carried by the aforementioned ridgeline, the Hyundai Santa Cruz (and its four-feet length) and the new cheapest Ford product you can buy, the Maverick.
I’ve actually taken a liking to the Ford Maverick, much to my own surprise. It seems a smorgasbord of all of the compact pickup truck traits I hate and some of the ones that pervade the new automotive landscape. It’s a unibody. The bed is six inches shorter than standard, in as much as these things were at some point ‘standard’, and integrated to the rest of the body. The C2 platform underpinning it means it’s primarily front wheel drive, the interior is missing a gear lever that’s replaced with a knob of limited ability to tell the computer what gear you want. I can keep piling on it and had for a while.
However, with the true compact pickup going away, and remembering the current Ridgeline is a full foot longer, it seems to have come out the best out of the new order of compact pickup trucks. And as though to rub it in, Ford has announced the Tremor package for it.
Ostensibly developed to improve the Maverick’s off-road capabilities, the Tremors main advantage is likely going to be additional resilience against the pockmarks and potholed surfaces of poorly-kept city infrastructure akin to the available FX4 pack. To that end, you get everything you get the skidplates and the larger tires fitted to the FX4, but gain further suspension changes and an additional inch of ground clearance. Useful if you hit a Marianas-depth pothole. A heavy duty and transmission cooler play second fiddle to the Tremor’s party piece, an upgraded AWD system with better torque vectoring. If their previous claims of being able to send 100% of the power to the back are true, then now it can send all of that power to a single wheel. It’s also has what ford coyly refers to as “Differential lock feature”.
The pickup keeps changing, filling the space left by the luxury full-size sedan with something overall more practical. It was only last month that GM announced that the new 2023 Colorado is ditching the extended cab and the long-bed. Crew and 5.5’ is your one and only choice. And since we’re going down this path and the solution for most bed woes is to always haul around a bed extender and a lockable foldable tonneau cover so nobody steals it, Suddenly the Maverick Tremor becomes incredibly appealing.
Best of all, you can help your friend move downtown and not only park it, but the $20 they’ll give you for the afternoon may actually offset a chunk of the fuel costs.
