By Marc J. Elzenbeck
It’s evening, and a landscaper sits in a grocery parking lot, savoring the remains of the day. The sign on his passenger door says “Landscaping,” the truck is a diesel and its idle resonates deep. The driver of the pristine white 2024 Chevy Silverado LTZ Duramax looks to be in his late 20s. His ride cost about $70,500 before dealer delivery fee, any extended warranty, or floor mats.
For this ride, a loan to a self-employed contractor would be about $1,200 every month for 7 years. That’s $40 per day before burning $8 per-gallon fuel while listening to its Bose 7-speaker premium sound system, which is playing Control Machete. The OnStar Remote Access plan with SOS, voice, and WiFi is included for 3 years through the myChevrolet app, after which it is $35 a month. Multiply those payments out and you’re at 100 grand. At $500 per lawn service, the math begins to work.
Three or four of those jobs would buy my 30-year-old pickup, which does not have a lift gate that electronically transforms into an escalator. There’s no button on the rear-view mirror that connects to a help desk. It cannot be started remotely to defrost the windshield, nor does it have a call center kill switch if someone steals it and hustles off to rob a credit union in Port Orchard.
It has scratches, a dent from a bag of cement that dropped off a forklift, a tailgate perfectly bent, and right now in the bed there’s some rotting hay leftovers from the half-million or so pounds it has hauled. Gotta spray that out. There are many like it, but this truck is mine. When it dies, if it dies, it will serve as a monument to everything that has been built well.
We stand on a cliff with two futures. Both are true. In one, there will be pickups that cost north of $100,000. We can drive them with our minds, and their windshields will convert into 120-inch theatre screens to play Alien sequels in Sensurround to ease the tedium of towing an 8-ton boat.
In another, we’ll have new $20,000 scratch-resistant plastic workhorses that do nothing but haul boxes, arborist equipment, and hitch up a decent trailer. No radios, no screens, no GPS, and no floor mats. Just tempered glass, some kind of horsepower, and vacuum-molded bodies.
The market opportunity is continents wide. New trucks are coming; old ones are thriving. Involuntary complexity versus studious simplicity. There is a black 1989 Chevy base pickup in Spanaway that roughly answers this description. It’s on sale for $18,500. Excellent condition, 157,000 miles, 5.7 liter V8, one owner. They don’t say if there’s a radio. If the original is still there from almost 40 years ago, it has an AM dial knob. Everything old gets new again.
Now let’s take a look at upcoming offerings.
Manufactured in Warsaw, Indiana, the Slate pickup will be on sale in a few months with an MSRP of $25K. It’s electric and has a go pedal, which is also the stop pedal. It makes a point of having manual roll-up windows, which don’t really save money, but probably do add a couple of miles to its largely conjectural range. It doesn’t top 100 mph, doesn’t need to, but it can accelerate up hills. Its gray-black body parts are plastic and there is some kind of suspension that isn’t too bad over bumps.
The automotive journalist James May just test-drove a Slate and found it to be acceptable. Former comedian, late-night host, and car collector Jay Leno said the same. There are options, decals, and configurations that can bring the price up to $35K if you really try to max it out (see their ordering website at slate.auto). This vehicle will sell.
Another gas-powered option filling the $20K niche and scheduled for 2028 sale is the REO Runabout. Its base T4X version starts at $21,500 with mechanical 4-wheel drive, a rumored Toyota 4 cylinder intended to last 500,000 miles, solid front and rear axles, designed and assembled in Dallas, Texas.
Six-speed automatic is optional; you can reserve one for $25 at reotrucks.com. They have a “right to repair” and bare bones philosophy, with a product intro happening this month (November 16th). It is compact, built like a Range Rover or savannah Cruiser, its platform similarly configurable. If it makes it through federal safety and compliance rigors, this truck will sell like cowboy boots.
We’re in the opening phase of an industrial revolution in which design, prototyping, and production are merging into one building. No longer are billions of dollars required to bring one commercial vehicle to market. Tesla’s recently unveiled flying car was reportedly developed by an old NASA engineer who strolled about the production floor building one prototype a week. The lunar module developed 60 years ago used the same thrust nozzle technology.
Luxury $100K pickups may not be a thing of the past, but cheap old and dinged-up pickups are definitely a thing of the present.
Mine has over 250,000 miles on it. I’m not sure how much over because I haven’t hooked the odometer back up. It doesn’t burn oil, at least not much. Anyway, if the engine quits, I’ll just put another in it. The radio stopped working a couple years back; should get that fixed.
Driving my 90-plus senior stepdad to his last doctor’s appointment, he said, “You know this rides pretty nice.” Yep. Bilstein shocks in the front, Monroe helper springs in back. Then he asked, “Hey, do you happen to remember a country song? It was called ‘The Night the Hogs Ate Poor Little Willy.’ I think it was in the 50s but I just can’t recall who sang it.”
I told him to give me a minute. Turns out the popular version was by Junior Brown and his Band of Renown. My truck has Spotify.
https://www.cars.com/vehicledetail/91430732-934a-45a0-b42b-c2712f02d274/
