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(Enlarge photo)
This massive display of sheet metal represents the latest and greatest in crew cab half-ton pickups.
(Photo by Scott Jacobs)
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Road Test: Comparison Test
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2004 Full-Size Truck Comparison Test
Introduction
By
Ed Hellwig, Lead Senior Editor
Date posted: 05-16-2004
We've all seen the commercials. Big burly pickups dragging tree stumps out of the ground or barreling through thick patches of mud in a downpour. They're flag-waving tributes to the vehicles Americans have grown to love, but somewhere in the back of our minds, we know the reality is much different.
Not only are most full-size trucks not dragged through the muck on a regular basis, they're not even all American. They haul kids to school as often as they carry loads of sheetrock and we expect them to be as comfortable as Camrys in the process. This idea of the full-size pickup as part work truck, part family vehicle has led to the proliferation of the four-door crew cab as the body style of choice. You get room for as many as six people, a cargo bed out back and a V8 under the hood — now all you have to do is choose one.
The current field of competitors has undergone a recent transformation that has
made it more competitive than ever before. Not only did Ford unleash an all-new
version of its top-selling truck, the 2004 Ford F-150,
but newcomer Nissan introduced its first-ever full-size in the 2004 Nissan Titan.
The 2004 Dodge Ram was fully
redesigned just two years ago and the 2004 Chevrolet Silverado received significant upgrades last year as well. Even Toyota came
through with a crew cab version of its 2004 Toyota Tundra
full-size for the first time this year.
While every manufacturer thinks its particular truck is the perfect jack-of-all-trades workhorse, we set out to determine which one of these overachievers puts it all together into the most complete package. Our comparison involved hundreds of miles of combined freeway, city and off-road terrain, as well as our usual battery of instrumented tests. And since these were trucks, we also hitched up an approximately 6,000-pound trailer and piled three adult passengers inside the cab to see how each vehicle would fare under load. We performed both timed acceleration runs and a climb up a 7 percent grade with the added weight aboard, and the results were revealing to say the least.
Picking an outright winner is always a tenuous decision given the peculiarities of today's truck buyers, but after two weeks of head-to-head test-drives, the winner was obvious. We didn't pull out any tree stumps with it or plow it through the mud, but we did just about everything else with it and it came out in one piece asking for more. Think you know which truck came out ahead? Read on to see if your guess matches our results.
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