Finding A Cheap Manual 4×4 Pickup Truck Has Become Depressingly Difficult

How did this happen so quickly? Just a few years ago you could buy a 1980s/90s pickup with a manual transmission for what seemed like pennies, but in the last five years, it seems, the remaining stock of manual, 4×4 trucks has dried up, and prices seem through the roof.

My friend Brandon is on the hunt for a manual four-wheel drive pickup truck to use around the farm. When he told me this it seemed like an easy undertaking, as surely there are plenty of cheap old Dodges, Fords, and Chevys out there with a front diff and a stick, right? It turns out the answer is “no.” Brandon has been having a tough time finding what was once a ubiquitous, cheap workhorse, and in trying to help him I realized: Maybe the days of cheap 4×4 stickshift pickups are behind us. And I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise, since manual trucks — especially full-sizers — have gone the way of the dodo.

“I looked at a manual V8 4WD Dodge Dakota in Virginia,” he told me today. “Frame had some massive rust going on. Wasn’t rusted through but won’t be long. The seller seemed confused because he ‘had rustproofing applied to the frame by a shop.’ It was just cheap black paint and it was way too late to make a difference.”

Clearly desperation has started kicking in.

Flashback to 10 years ago, when I bought the above 1985 Jeep J10 for $3,500. That was a decent amount of money for that truck back then, and a number of my friends told me I overpaid. But it was exactly the truck I wanted; I’d looked at it on the way back to Michigan from my friend’s place in North Carolina, and I couldn’t exactly negotiate given that I told the seller “Hold onto this for one week; I’ll come back with a trailer and cash.”

So I paid the full $3,500, got a ribbing from my engineer-buddies at Chrysler for having paid too much, and then fixed the Jeep up and drove it with a big smile on my face. Fast forward to 2025, and my smile is even bigger, because even after adjusting for inflation, those $3,500 in 2015 would have been $4,643.41 today, and under $5 grand for that mostly rust-free pickup in 2025 would be a smokin’-hot deal. 

What also would have been a smokin’ hot deal is this 1993 Chevy K2500 five-speed 4×4 that Jalopnik reader Jason offered me for, if I recall correctly, somewhere around $4,000. I’m not sure why I didn’t say “yes” immediately, because this thing was in great shape!

 

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Sure, some paint had flaked off, but the interior looked great, and there really was little rust to speak of. Plus, a 350 hooked to a five-speed in a bench-seat-equipped regular cab pickup? It doesn’t get better:

Here’s the $700 “holy Grail” ZJ next to that ’93 Chevy 2500 I fell in love with that night while traversing the Rockies. I love beaters. pic.twitter.com/84zWMTdEub

— David Tracy (@davidntracy) December 17, 2019

But deals like my J10 and that K2500 — which were far from anomalies pre-pandemic — seem to be hard to come by these days.

The truck above, which has 130,000 more miles than my J10 does, is in OK shape. It’s missing the proper front bumper and the correct wheels, plus it’s got a few rust holes in the bed (and I’m suspicious of those bedside seams), but it’s not that far off the overall condition that my Jeep was in, and it’s $7,500. This truck is in even closer shape compared to what my J10 was in:

It’s an automatic and a V8, and it has over 100,000 miles more than my truck, plus there’s some weirdness going on with the black paint on the front end; the seller is asking $9000.

This $10,000 1976 Jeep J10 looks quite nice:

But a closer look reveals that there’s quite a bit of rust:

To be sure, my J10 has a bit of rust, too, but it’s nothing that bad.

I can’t really tell you what exactly has happened to the Jeep J10 market over the years, because I don’t have great data, but here’s what Classic.com has based on its listings over the years, starting in 2020 (note that this isn’t specific to manuals):

I wouldn’t put too much stock into that 50% increase since 2020, since — again — the data is pretty limited. But my own “eye test” on J10s says that finding a cheap, decent one just ain’t happening these days, at least not with any sort of regularity.

But let’s hop over to Chevys, because that 1993 K2500 that I could have bought for $3500 is worth more than I would spend today. In fact, I just looked for a cheap five-speed K2500, and what I found is, well, not bad, but it has 100,000 more miles on it than the truck I drove:

That truck is $5,500 OBO, which isn’t terrible. But overall, per Carguru’s Price Trends, Chevy C/K 1500s are up almost 90% since late 2019, with average prices up to almost $13,000 from about $7,000:

Motorbiscuit wrote two years ago the story “It’s Hip to Be Square: Is It Time to Invest in an OBS Truck?” with a subheading reading “Values are skyrocketing for square-body and OBS Chevys.” Again, this article is based on incomplete data and it’s not specific to manuals or 4x4s, but it’s something. And Hot Rod Magazine declared pretty much the same thing in the article “Are Chevy’s OBS 1988 – 1998 Pickups the Next Big Thing?”

From that article:

In truth, the GMT400 platform has been desirable since the day it came out, with customizers like Boyd Coddington being among the first to modify them. It’s not quite accurate to say the GMT400 platform is the next big thing when it really always has been popular. But in the last two years, we’ve seen a dramatic uptick in the amount and quality of performance aftermarket parts available for this platform. It will be very interesting to see how far it goes.

OBS (Old Body Style) Ford owners are also saying they’re seeing similar things. Just see the post “OBS Values….Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” (among others)on Ford Truck Enthusiast Forums. Here’s the Cargurus price trend; notice that the price has gone from an average of $3,500 to about $10,000 (145% increase) more for an 1989 F-150 (again, this data is pretty weak, but it’s something)

I reached out to Caleb Jacobs, The Drives’ go-to truck editor, and just a wonderful human. I wanted his thoughts on the topic of manual 4×4 trucks being hard to find at a decent price. Here’s what he had to say:

Yeah, man. If it has one or more of those keywords—“4×4,” “manual,” and especially “diesel”—then it probably costs too much. And even in the post-COVID market (values are no longer inflated like they were during the pandemic) people seem to list them way high and hope they catch a sucker. It apparently doesn’t matter that they never sell either because Facebook Marketplace is littered with trucks that were posted months ago and sometimes more than a year ago, yet they’re still available if you shoot the seller a DM.

I’d say that the truck market, more than any other, has missed the memo that prices are no longer inflated like they were during the pandemic.

There are some deals to be had out there, but things aren’t like they once were — not even five years ago. That’s apparent to anyone looking for a stickshift 4×4 pickup. With that said, it seems smaller trucks are a little easier to find. How about this diesel 5-speed Ranger?