Toyota Motor Co. did its homework when redesigning its upcoming Toyota Tundra pickup.
According to San Express-News, Toyota designers, engineers, and—amazingly--members of the board spent weeks crisscrossing the U.S. visiting farms, logging camps, mining camps, and ranches, all to determine how Americans used their pickups.
“They've done every kind of test you could possibly do not only to make a tough truck on the highway but a tough ranch truck,” says rancher Bobby Steiner of Texas. “They load the trailers, they hook them up and they load them and pull them and measure how far a truck goes down. They measure how a truck takes off with a trailer. They ran all these tests that I didn't realize were actually done.”
Even the born-and-bred American engineers of Toyota had their eyes opened by the experience. Mark Schrage, project manager of the Tundra, had grown up in Montana where four-wheel trucks were the norm. Thus, he was surprised when he discovered two-wheel trucks dominating the Texas roads. He and his colleagues had to explain to Toyota that Americans used their trucks not only for transporting heavy loads but like a car as well.
Our take? Full specifications of the Tundra have not been released. Toyota then has done the almost unheard move of delaying the full-sized truck from January 2007 to later in the year. While the automaker has stated the delay was to check fit and finish issues, we're wondering if executives are having second thoughts on penetrating the last bastion of American dominance.