My future brother-in-law bought a new 1988 Toyota Truck (known as the Hilux outside of North America; given the very simple vehicle naming scheme here, it’s surprising that Toyota didn’t have a US-market Car to go along with the Truck and Van back then) in San Diego, and I went on many an adventure in this indestructible machine over the ensuing decades.
This was the cheapest Toyota Truck you could buy in 1988, and maybe the cheapest Toyota, period; it rolled off the showroom floor as a carbureted, 4-speed-manual, rear-wheel-drive stripper with zero options. No tachometer. No radio. No bumpers. No side mirrors. Unfortunately, while the 1984-1988 Truck with 22R four-cylinder engine was nearly immortal (provided it didn’t live in an area patrolled by the Rust Monster), clutches aren’t immortal, and the original clutch in this Truck gave out about a decade ago, with 234,118 hard miles on the odometer. My brother-in-law had a 9-to-5, a mortgage and a minivan at that point, and the Truck got parked in the driveway with vague plans to fix the clutch… someday. The years went by, and blackberrry vines engulfed the poor Truck as it settled on its flattening tires. Don’t judge— we all let back-burnered projects go for too long.
There was a hazy idea that my nephew would get the Truck when he turned 16, but my sister laid down the law as the fateful birthday approached: allowing her child to drive a non-airbag-equipped, flimsy, 30-year-old truck would amount to the same thing as making him swim laps in a tank full of fuming nitric acid. Hell no, he wasn’t going to get the Truck. But the mention of the Truck led to the blackberry vines getting hacked out of the driveway and off of the Truck, and then the desirability of having a driveway unobstructed by a non-running vehicle came to the fore. Fearing that it would end up in The Crusher, I stepped in. I agreed to fly out to California a day before I was due to work the Button Turrible 24 Hours of Lemons race, fix the clutch, and then fly back later to take care of all the stuff that goes bad when a vehicle sits for a decade (e.g., fuel system, oil, brake lines, tires, battery, hundreds of pounds of dead blackberry vines wrapped around the suspension). Then I’d drive the Truck to my place in Denver and keep it in the family, driving it occasionally until my nephew got old enough to override his mother’s safety concern. Obviously, there were no weak points in this plan.
I’d need a parts runner, of course, so I called up Toyota and arranged for the descendant of the 1988 Truck: a 2018 Tacoma, an appropriate Race Organizer Review machine for this situation; I’d pick up Truck parts, then drive it from the San Francisco Bay Area to Buttonwillow Raceway Park and back. Press loaners mostly don’t come in low-zoot trim levels, because it’s easier for car writers if we can review the entire options list, so I didn’t get the fleet-spec RWD Tacoma with four-banger (which would have been more like the ’88 Truck); instead, I got a loaded Barcelona Red Tacoma TRD Offroad 4×4 Double Cab.
This truck is quite American in general attitude and capabilities, though you can still buy its Hilux-badged cousin elsewhere. The ’88 Truck was already up on jackstands in the driveway when it arrived, so it proved difficult to get a shot of the two together that demonstrated the size difference. The ’18 weighs about a ton more than the ’88 and has nearly three times the power.
The 1988 Truck is bouncy, noisy, and powered by a gnashy long-stroke four-cylinder that demands patience when accelerating onto freeway on-ramps. The four-speed manual transmission has no overdrive, meaning highway cruising is both loud and thirsty (for a 2,500-pound vehicle). The 2018 Tacoma TRD rides like a tall, comfortable sedan with a bit of added suspension bounce, and it’s powered by a gnashy long-stroke V6 that shoves the truck’s two-ton bulk around without breaking a sweat. The ’88 has the advantage when it comes to loading cargo, with a nice low bed; the ’18 Tacoma, like nearly all modern pickups, has the bed up high; a low bed would look ridiculous when combined with the “command position” high driver’s seat demanded by 2018 commuters.
I’d ordered the clutch kit ahead of time, so I just needed to fetch regular maintenance items and a few junkyard bits. A Yaris would have done the job just as well as a big ol’ pickup, but I wanted the Hilux to be helped out by a Tacoma.
Once the clutch job started, I realized that the old 22R had been an oil leaker for many years, and that the blackberry vines had coated everything under the Truck with spider-packed, dusty, nasty dried vegetation. Vines had even wrapped dozens of circuits around the transmission. It was a much ickier, grimier job than I’d expected.
It turned out that the clutch kit I’d ordered was meant for a four-wheel-drive V6 Truck, so I couldn’t get the truck moving under its own power for a photo session with the Tacoma. I went back later and finished the work, at which point registration became the big problem (those of you who have lived in California know what I mean). We’ll revisit that story later, but for now we’ll go Full Tacoma with this story.
After scrubbing off all that Truck grime, I hit the road and headed 240 miles south to Buttonwillow. Even with big knobby off-road tires, four-wheel-drive, and big ride height, the Tacoma drove in a reasonably car-like manner. I took a detour on Twisselman Road in Kern County, in order to listen to the Murilee Arraiac song of the same name.
I didn’t beat the tar out of the Tacoma on a big off-roading adventure, nor did I haul a ton of Rubidium ingots to a very futuristic-yet-undeniably-masculine construction site. No, I did what most American truck owners do: drive this truck on the highway for long distances. It did a fine job at that task, and the Entune Premium Audio system ensured that I had music to drown out the tire drone. With more than 700 miles of mostly highway driving, I got 17.89 miles per gallon; not quite as good as the low-20s fuel economy of the 1988 Hilux, but pretty good for a vehicle that weighs nearly 4,500 pounds.
Source: Read Full Article