IT doesn’t surprise me that, after 14 years of stalking the American pickup market, Toyota has finally unleashed full-size pickup hell with its monstrous Toyota Tundra, a truck that goes nose to nose with big-ugly domestics Ford F-150 and Chevy Silverado. Now that I have driven the redesigned 2007 Toyota Tundra — in its most gawdamighty-large configuration, the CrewMax 4X4 SR5 with the 5.7-liter V8 — I can’t even raise an eyebrow. It’s exactly what I thought it would be: a half-earnest, half-mocking tribute to the American pickup truck, bigger and saccharine-sweeter than its competitors, with major-league engineering (1,590-pound payload capacity in 4x4 trim) and focus-group features galore, including half a dozen of the biggest cup holders this side of the NFL.
Actually, the whole truck has a weird pituitary quality to it. It’s hard to survey the oversized rotary controls and massive seat cushions and not think of the sausage fingers and broad American backsides they were designed for.
What is astonishing to me is that people are buying these trucks by the trainload. I’ve spent the last two weeks in North Carolina, and I see these trucks everywhere. This is the South, NASCAR country, where truck loyalty is generational and one’s Chevy versus Ford affiliation is expressed by cartoon decals in back windows, where Calvin is urinating on the rival brand. So whatever happened to truck-buyer loyalty? For that matter, whatever happened to good old “Buy American” xenophobia?
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