As you all know, pickup trucks are not very popular in Europe, for a variety of reasons.
You might, thus, amuse yourselves by reading this review written by a journalist in the UK Sunday Times (the leading quality Sunday paper here) after he bought a Ford Ranger. FYI Brian Appleyard is not normally a motoring writer.
Ok, it's not a Chrysler (but he does mention having seen Dodge Rams and comments on their environmental friendliness) but it might still be a fun read.
DAS
Pick it up there: a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do Bryan Appleyard broke through the class barrier and made a lot of new friends by buying a pick-up truck. Now he's a happy Good Ol' Boy
A match made in heaven: Appleyard with his Ford Range XLT (DWAYNE SENIOR)
The great thing about the middle classes is their gullibility. You can sell most things to the working class, but after a while they always turn shrewd. You can sell nothing to the upper class because they always buy the same things from the same people. But the middle classes walk around with the word "sucker" emblazoned on their foreheads in letters of fire. This is why, when they get to country places and the remote possibility that they may hit a muddy road enters their head, they can easily be persuaded to spend vast sums of money on jaw-droppingly ugly 4x4s like the Porsche Cayenne or the BMW X5. Then, of course, having spent the money, they're too scared to go off-road for fear of scratching or denting their gleaming uber-chariots.
Everybody, from Ken "Foxy-Woxy" Livingstone upwards, has pointed out that people don't need big four-wheel-drive machines. However, some - like, for example, me - do. I periodically have to transport big things between London and Norfolk, and in Norfolk I drive down muddy marshland roads and (increasingly frequently thanks to global warming) through deep water.
I would be insane to try to do these things in an X5 or a Cayenne. They're not big enough for the "big things" and every bramble-scratch or rock-dent would be taking hundreds of pounds off their value. The solution is obvious, but you need to be very socially secure. So brace yourself, because here it is: get a truck. I did and I'm a better man for it.
"I couldn't do that," said a friend when I told him of my plans. "I'd look like a painter and decorator."
I have no problem with looking like a painter and decorator. But the British class-thing is a problem. In America the middle classes think nothing of having a pick-up truck - and they do have some gorgeous trucks. The most beautiful motoring spectacle I have ever seen was at the Indianapolis 500. I don't mean the race itself, which makes Formula One look interesting, but beforehand during preparations for the race. Overnight rain was removed from the track by six bright-red Dodge Rams thundering round the circuit in diagonal formation with gigantic hairdryers on their backs.
Americans have so many trucks that they are startled by our "trucklessness". Some newly arrived US tourists recently spotted mine parked in the street and cried: "Look, our first truck!" Over here we go all prissy at the prospect that our vehicle might make people think we are in, ugh, some trade. And so we buy dumb-ass mink-lined 4x4s instead of pick-ups. Admittedly they're not as environmentally insensitive as some would have you believe - empty bendy buses are much worse - they are just pointlessly extravagant celebrations of an unnecessary function they are extremely badly designed to fulfil.
But let me tell you about my truck . . . because I love it. I love it more than my wife's Porsche Boxster S and I love it more than the Jaguar XKR or the TVR Griffith - both super-desirable cars I have driven in the past. Here's a test: when you park your car do you look back at it with satisfaction? I did with the Jag and the TVR, I don't with the Porsche, but with the truck I just stop dead and stare gratefully at the overpowering rightness of the thing.
It's a Ford Ranger XLT in blue and silver with an aluminium checker plate Mountain Top cover over the back, on which a gay friend says he wants to dance as I drive along the M11. I thought of getting the special-edition Thunder version, but that has pointless leather seats and, very embarrassingly, Thunder written on the side.
The Ranger has five seats, air-conditioning and excellent off-road capability. It's easier to drive than most cars and it's a lot quieter than the Porsche. It's not fast, but I've "done speed" in it, and it's fun but not really worth it because, on any given journey, you only get there about 5% faster.
My truck doesn't have sports-car driving dynamics but it has a kind of authoritative languor about it, just kind of suavely rolling along.
On some country roads it even acquires an amusing boat-like pitching motion. Of course it carries almost anything you can think of: I've had about a ton of damp wood in the back. Oddly, its performance seems unaffected by whether it's loaded, and naturally I don't wash it. And you know what it cost? With the £800 Mountain Top it was just under £18,000. A joke.
It has an amiable but slightly weak 2.5 litre diesel engine so it doesn't compare with American trucks, which are bigger - much bigger. Unlike certain other contributors to these pages I do, however, have environmental pangs, and the Ranger delivers lots of miles to the gallon whereas the Dodge Ram and all its butch cousins blast continuous strips out of the ozone layer.
The Ranger does at least look as though it's beefy, with its heavyweight chrome front and excitingly weird tubes around the sides, called "style bars". Not that, I am happy to say, any designer appears to have been within a hundred miles of the thing. It's just chucked together with a few truck "signifiers". But it's handsomely proportioned and, inside, you do have that American feeling of sitting in moving space rather than the European feeling of being wedged in a machine.
But here's the really big thing: people love me in the truck almost as much as they loathe me in the Porsche. All my class hangups have gone, I am one with the people. Lorry drivers flash me to signal I am past them. People smile as they let me in. Other truckers nod and grimace knowingly in traffic jams. At service stations - even when I get out of the truck wearing a suit and tie - I am silently included in the stoical brotherhood of those who drive for a living. I once parked outside a hardware shop where I bought a screw or something and the bloke actually said: "Nice truck." I glowed. As Daphne says in Frasier: "You can't buy memories like that."
Now obviously you'll want to buy a truck at once. So here's some serious consumer thinking. Trucks cost more to insure than cars, primarily because a lot of them get nicked. It's the price of being as one with the people. The Ranger is a cheaper buy because the market leaders are Mitsubishi, Toyota and Nissan, and Ford is obliged to discount.
In fact Mitsubishi is so dominant in this market that the salesman couldn't believe it when I decided against their L200 and bought the Ford. He rang me up, incredulous. But I prefer the redneck looks of the Ford to the weird retro of the L200 and I saved about £4,000.
All the trucks have much the same level of performance and carrying capacity. The special editions, such as the Mitsubishi Animal and Warrior, tend to be expensive and look and sound embarrassing, although I know this SAS bloke who drives around in a Warrior and makes it look cool. Well, he would.
Against all that, the commercial vehicle side of Ford has self-esteem issues. I had to buy my truck from a guy in a Portakabin way off the main lot and, though Ford and the rest are very keen to sell trucks to the middle classes, the salesman seemed baffled as to my motives.
And he did manage to lose my Ranger at one point - it simply vanished from his computer screen, finally turning up on the dockside in Southampton. The upside of this was that it gave me the opportunity to call Ford and say: "I suppose a truck's out of the question?" Now, well . . . life is good. I roll up and down the Norfolk route chewing gum, raising eyebrows with the other truckers as yet another X5 weaves stupidly across the tarmac, and deploying ruthless lane-savvy to pass Lamborghinis. Or I lapse into a dream, fancying myself on a dirt road in Dixie and, like the Good Ol' Boy I have become in my heart, I allow tears to streak my face as Emmylou Harris croons and moans her way through Daniel Lanois's baptismal prayer The Maker.
It is, as they say, a no-brainer. Get a truck.
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