History Lesson 
Wheels of Fortune
To the delight of automakers in Detroit and elsewhere, there's only one vehicle that matters to every single Texan: the pickup. And no wonder. Whether it's a West Texas ranch hand or a suburban soccer mom behind the wheel, the pickup says a lot about who we are—and who we'd like to be.
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Keeping up with all those options is a bigger task than it used to be. Ford and Chevy have followed the 1994 Dodge to bigger and beefier exteriors (and emphasized their high-powered diesel engines, which compete with the Dodge's Cummins), but after the SUV boom of the nineties, pickup buyers started looking for elevated comfort inside their trucks. All but gone for good are the plain Jane, steel-and-vinyl interiors McCombs used to wash out with a hose. Today's interiors are done up like living rooms that would take a team of maids a full day to detail. And buyers who fifteen years ago might have brought four requests to the dealership—"I'd like a cloth seat, an automatic transmission, a cassette player, and bumpers"—require a whole other set of considerations.
Every touch of luxury you could want in a car is available in a truck: seat warmers, GPS systems, satellite radio, and DVD players. Chevy's top-of-the-line four-door family truck has power ports to run the kids' video games in the back seat and power everything in the front, so that Mom and Dad can both program a preferred seat and steering wheel position, an air conditioning temperature, and the volume and station of the radio. The truck will automatically go to one setting or the other depending on whose key unlocks the door. Ford's top-end package, a four-door King Ranch edition that comes with the Running W brand of Texas's most famous ranch stamped or stuck on nearly every available surface, is upholstered in King Ranch leather, with saddlebags on the backs of the front seats and a leather-care kit to protect your investment, which can run as high as $50,000.
These are clearly not work trucks, and as the market has mushroomed, part of the growth has been in high-dollar toys. Besides the King Ranch model, Ford has cross-licensed a Harley-Davidson pickup, which is decked out in black leather, and two years ago produced a bright-yellow Tonka concept truck. Dodge's Ram SRT-10 has a 500-horsepower, ten-cylinder Viper engine and goes 150 miles per hour. Chevy's Avalanche is the auto equivalent of a Transformer toy, covered in hard plastic and able to switch from a pickup to an SUV and back again. The company makes a new convertible roadster pickup, the SSR, a round-bodied, low-riding novelty truck that, with its top down and its bed cover off, looks like a deviled egg with the yolk licked out. Cadillac makes a pickup now, and Lincoln, Humvee, and Honda aren't far behind.
But it's the popularity of the four-door truck, the pickup-as-family-sedan phenomenon, that's driving the market today. According to Shedden, regular cab pickups with just one row of seats accounted for 95 percent of sales as recently as 1980. But through the eighties, Ford sold enough half-ton F-150's with extended cabs—a foot and a half of space behind the seat for storing whatever you didn't want to get wet or lost, be it tools, supplies, or your kids—that Chevy started making them too. Then Ford noticed a new kind of buyer for its larger work trucks. "In the late nineties we were looking at Texas sales of our F-250s and F-350s," says Shedden, "and the four-door crew cabs, which were built for actual work crews, were up around fifty percent of the mix. But the mix had a high number of Lariats." (The Lariat was Ford's top-of-the-line luxury package.) That told Ford that the trucks were being used for something other than work, a fact that Texas dealers confirmed. So in 2000 Ford introduced the F-150 SuperCrew, the first four-door half-ton, and redefined what a family sedan was in Texas and across the U.S. Within three years, Dodge and Chevy were making half-ton crews too, and now, just four years after they were invented, they account for one third of all national pickup sales, with the extended-cab models accounting for half and the regular cab making up the rest. It can be hard to even find a standard cab pickup on most Texas lots; that's not what families are looking for.
"There was a definite push-pull," says Brent Dewar, Chevrolet's general manager for marketing. "The Texas market was already moving in that family-sedan direction. That was a market pull. In the rest of the country, we had to create that demand, give the market a push."
IT WAS ONLY A MATTER of time before foreign car makers decided to make their own move into the full-size pickup market. Still, Toyota's Japanese brass were hesitant when their North American execs suggested that the company introduce a half-ton pickup in the early nineties. They weren't afraid of the Big Three's dominance of the full-size market; it had taken time, but Toyota and other Japanese automakers had already overcome American resistance to Japanese cars and small trucks. But they worried that a full-size truck was just a work vehicle, and despite plenty of research to the contrary, they couldn't wrap their minds around the idea of a pickup doing anything but hauling equipment or cattle trailers. So executives at Toyota Motor North America invited their bosses to come to the U.S.—more specifically, to Irving. On a Sunday. When the Cowboys were playing. Then they turned them loose in the parking lot of Texas Stadium a few hours before game time. Any misapprehensions about the place of the pickup in American life were cleared up before the first rack of ribs came off the grill at the tailgate party.
At first Toyota hedged its bet. In 1999 it introduced the Tundra, a full-size pickup that became known as a "7/8 truck" because Toyota had stopped just short of making it as large as the American models. At 4 percent of the market, it has yet to threaten Detroit. The pickup explosion emboldened the company, however, and in February 2003 Toyota announced it would open an $800 million plant in San Antonio, where it will build a scaled-up Tundra to compete head-to-head with the Big Three. "Right now we make 100,000 pickups a year, and we'll take that to 250,000 with this plant," says Dennis Cuneo, a senior vice president with Toyota North America. "And we'll need someone to buy them. This will help us sell in the heart of the market." Cuneo figures that a sticker reading "Made in Texas, by Texans" on its special Texas-package trucks—with twenty-inch wheels, running boards, a bed liner, and a "Texas Edition" badge—will work to that end. But there is more to it than that. "Being in Texas will also help us learn how to make a truck we can sell elsewhere," Cuneo says.
Nissan has moved in on the market too. Last summer it brought out its first half-ton, the Titan, which on paper can do everything the American trucks can. "It's as hairy-chested as any of the others," says Geoff Wardle, an auto designer at Pasadena, California's Art Center College of Design, America's foremost auto design school. And, of course, Nissan delivered the Titan to Texas dealers a full month before the rest of the country.
Although the Detroit executives try to sound unconcerned, Toyota and Nissan have their attention. The threat is serious enough that last year, when Ford introduced a new F-150, a $1.8 billion, top-to-bottom redesign of the world's best-selling vehicle, it took the occasion to send a message to Toyota. For the launch, Ford shipped one hundred prototypes to San Antonio for eight waves of "ride and drives," two-day opportunities for auto writers and Ford dealers to get to know the new pickups. The writers were treated like out-of-town wedding guests, with Ford trucks to drive from the airport, lunch waiting at the historic Menger Hotel, and activities planned for every minute of the weekend. There were lectures and demonstrations at a dealership in Boerne, an off-road obstacle course and seven-thousand-pound trailers to tow in Bandera, and a glad-you-came barbecue in Gruene. And as the writers drove those new F-150s through the Hill Country, they saw Ford logos and slogans painted on what seemed like every billboard, barn, and water tower on the road. "Obviously Toyota wasn't the single factor in choosing to do this in San Antonio," says Todd Eckert, who helped put the event together for Ford. "Six of our top twenty-five truck dealers nationally are in the San Antonio area. But we do want ultimately to remind people that, yes, Toyota is coming, but Ford is already here." Chevrolet makes a similar pitch. "[We're] number one in owner loyalty right now, and it's driven mostly by trucks," says Jay Allen, the head of Chevy's southwest zone, which includes Texas. "We've been doing this a long time, and we've given consumers no reason to jump ship."
But Toyota and Nissan aren't counting on luring farmers who trade a GMC for a GMC every five years. They're looking at growing markets, like Generation Y kids and Hispanics, who, according to studies, don't make a priority of sticking to domestic brands. The Hispanic market is particularly important to Toyota executives, who were well-aware when they chose San Antonio that a large Hispanic workforce would be available to fill those three thousand new jobs. As the Hispanic market grows, Toyota wants to be its truck. So while Toyota and Nissan's projections may be high—if both company's estimates come true, they'll have 15 percent of the market in five years—it will take time. Red McCombs, who now sells Toyotas as well as Fords, says Toyota's goal is market supremacy in Texas and that it has the wherewithal to get there. Even though he's first and foremost a salesman, he's been right before.
Some observers speculate that Japan's pickup plan could eventually cost the American automakers $1 billion annually. And on that front, Detroit is already working. Trying to address pickup buyers' changing needs, it's putting more focus on fuel efficiency and safety. Chevy and GMC are already selling gas-electric hybrid engines, and Ford's new F-150 was the only 2004 model pickup to earn the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's highest rating for protecting passengers in frontal collisions. Whether these moves will enable the Big Three to fend off the new competition remains to be seen, but at least one fact should help Detroit sleep well at night: In Texas, demand for the pickup isn't going anywhere. "Pickups are like what's left in a population's DNA after a plague," says Ron Tyler. "The survivors are the ones with the right gene to beat it. After the plague is gone, they may not need the gene anymore, but it is still there."
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