Driving 20 minutes south of the heart of San Antonio, Texas, puts you in sight of one of the newest and largest pickup-truck manufacturing plants in the world. Once it's fully up and running, they'll build about 200,000 vehicles there, and with a few modifications, there's room to bump that to 300,000. However, what makes this particular plant special is that it has 21 other factories on the property. Right now, Toyota is probably the only automaker that could get its suppliers to do something like this, but the world's most modern production facility is here, and Toyota is hoping this gamble will allow it to take a good chunk out of what used to be the most American of automotive segments.
Don't be fooled for a second. This is one of the most spectacular marketing and public-relations campaigns to date. Everything Toyota has done in this country to this point has been building to this singular event--making a competitive product to compete with one of the most American of icons--the full-size pickup truck. Nissan tried it and failed. Honda tried it and fabulously failed. If there's a company able to make this happen, though, it's Toyota. It's measured every interior detail on the new Ford, every underbody spec from the new Chevy, and every bed dimension on the new Ram. Designed in this country, built (not just assembled, but built) in this country, and only sold in this country (and Canada), this new pickup is more impressive than any other import we've seen.
But is it any good?
We've had plenty of seat time, as you can read in our first head-to-head road test pitting the new Toyota against the newest GMT900 Chevy, a vehicle we thought of highly enough to name it our 2007 Truck of the Year. Both trucks are strong, and spending time behind the wheel of the Toyota especially will reinforce that notion. However, at least in Toyota's case, we'd caution that just getting good numbers isn't always enough to carry the day. Making a worthwhile pickup truck requires several intangibles.
It'll take me a while to warm to the Tundra's looks--clearly a Dodge derivative, with just a hint of something aquatic. Toyota's design direction is about "the force of fist" cutting through the air. Hmmm. Not sure I get that. However, what I do get are its towing and climbing abilities, and how fast it'll run a quarter mile.
Although not the only criterion for determining value, all our test vehicles go to the track (in our case, California Speedway) into the care and motivation of our world-class test crew. It's our first opportunity to see how much respect the builders have for their users.