I Don’t Think These Sorts Of Truncated Trucks Exist Anymore

There’s a few categories of cars that seem to have just sort of disappeared. Anything with a rumble seat, for example, has been effectively gone for many decades, likely the result of people’s decreased willingness to be force-fed insects at 60 mph and an increased interest in preserving human lives. More recently, there’s a kind of vehicle that was once around up until about the 1990s that’s gone today: the truncated-truck fun car.

I suppose some of the earliest examples of these may have been the Ford Bronco, or, really, the second-gen Bronco from 1978, when they were built from shortened Ford F-100 pickup trucks. Though, now that I think about it, the Chevy Blazer, starting in 1969 to compete with the International Scout and the original Ford Bronco, was made from shortened K10 pickup trucks, so that may really be the first of this kind.

These were inherently a fun idea, and in most of these types of vehicles the division between cab and “bed” was eliminated, creating a very open, flexible sort of interior, and, even better, usually the bed area had a removable hard top or soft top to let it be enclosed or open! The one of these I was specifically thinking of today was the Isuzu Amigo:

The Amigo was a great example of one of these shortened pickups, and was based on a pickup I used to own, which was just sold under the very creative name Isuzu Pickup here in America. I guess you could get one at your local Building Full of People Who Would Sell You Isuzu Vehicles back in the 1990s. This was mine:

From the doors forward, this was pretty much the exact same as an Amigo, but where my truck had an all-business truck bed, the Amigo had seats and a soft top and a lot of potential for fun.

I mean, look at that thing! I even like the clunky way they made those rear shoulder belts work, with the pair of rounded-triangular tubes back there. And you have to respect the novel CHMSL solution, giving the third brake lamp its own little rollbar on the roof!

These were just useful, fun little machines. You could easily commute to work in them – these rode well and were pretty comfortable, at least based on my experience with the pickup variant – they were small and easy to park and maneuver, they could haul a decent amount of stuff with the rear seat removed, like a little truck, and you could carry three other friends in near-convertible-like open-ness, going off-road as desired thanks to the four-wheel drive.

These were Swiss Army Knife vehicles, and I don’t know if anything like this is available new today. The Jeep Gladiator is too big to really be like this, and it’s the only open-top truck-like thing on the market now. A cut-down two-door Ford Maverick could be adapted to something like this, but I don’t see Ford doing that any time soon, sadly.

The truncated truck needs to come back. These were a good example of how fun cars could be before everything had to get so stupidly “premium.” I miss when cars could just be a bit silly. For example, look at this late ’90s Amigo commercial:

It’s a parody of this classic Slinky commercial, in case you’re not as miserably aged as I am and don’t remember this:

Also: holy shit, Slinkies were clever! It’s just a spring, a helical spring, repurposed into a toy. A naval engineer saw some coiled wires fall off a shelf and sort of “walk” and that inspired these things. He experimented with the right kind of steel to make the springs from, and boom it was a hit. Later he left the company and became a missionary, but his (then divorced) wife kept it going, well into the plastic Slinky era.

I miss these sort of fun cars. I think our overall mental health as a nation would improve if there were cheap cut-down pickups with back seats and soft tops in fun colors, just out there in the world.

Oh! And also, because I think one commenter kept bitching about it, I’m trying a new variant of the Cold Start graphical bug. Do we prefer this one? Let me know!