Ford and Chevy pickup trucks are really popular in North America. But did you ever stop to think about Japan's contribution to the trucking world? That's right, we're talking about the Pickup with a capital P, or the Hilux if you want to call it that.
It's been called the cockroach of pickups because it just refuses to die. At the hands of the old Top Gear team, the Hilux has been set on fire, dropped from the sky, hit with a wrecking ball, and drowned in the ocean. It survived all that, earning itself a reputation for indestructibility. Did we forget they also put the Toyota on top of a building that was being blown up? Yeah, don't forget about that.
It's safe to say the old truck received some tough love and hasn't been the darling of the 80s custom truck world either. However, this rendering by Brad Builds goes some way toward rectifying that.
It's supposed to be a drift truck conversion, sitting low down on the ground. The artist added a widebody kit and "forged" his own carbon fiber texture on top. The aero spoiler and the massive rear diffuser clash with the boxy classic truck, but that's kind of the whole point of the rendering.
Before you tell us that "drift trucks" don't exist, know that Toyota officially supported a Tacoma widebody project inspired by D1 for last year's SEMA Show.
The Tacoma and Hilux are actually connected at the hip. This first-generation Taco' came out in 1995 and was a replacement for the model known simply as the Pickup or the Compact Truck, which in turn was a re-branded Hilux.
In the 1980s, Toyota made the camper version of the Hilux, which later became the 4Runner. We might even have a chance of seeing this classic 3rd-gen Hilux body going sideways, thanks to the @scrapelux project that you can check out below.
Mihnea's favorite cars have already been built, the so-called modern classics from the '80s and '90s. He also loves local car culture from all over the world, so don't be surprised to see him getting excited about weird Japanese imports, low-rider VWs out of Germany, replicas from Russia or LS swaps down in Florida. Full profile
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