I Just Got An Amazing Deal One Of The Greatest American Pickup Trucks Ever

“Finding A Cheap Manual 4×4 Pickup Truck Has Become Depressingly Difficult,” is an article I wrote [checks calendar]…last week. That very same day, while doing research for that article, I stumbled upon a cheap manual 4×4 pickup truck. Was it depressingly difficult to find? Yes. Did I have to drive to the middle of nowhere to buy it? Yes. But as soon as work ended I blasted to the middle of the desert in my Pontiac Aztek, and today I am the proud owner of one of the finest American trucks ever: A GMT400, specifically a 1989 Chevrolet K1500 with a stickshift.

If you look at my article from last week, you’ll see me reminiscing about the GMT400 pickup I was lent back in 2019, and you’ll read how much I loved that thing. It was a five-speed four-wheel drive box on wheels with a Chevy 350 engine, and it was just lovely.

I thought the days of finding a reasonably priced GMT400 pickup were behind me (hence my article). Everyone’s been writing it, including car value experts at Hagerty, whose article “Values for GM’s full-size trucks (1988–2002) are still rock-solid” from 2022 includes the following:

Now, surging interest and values in these trucks has us humming one of Mr. Seger’s biggest hits as we investigate what might behind this gradual rise to collectibility.

In the past three years, values of Chevy GMT400-series trucks have increased by 63 percent. No coincidence, calls to Hagerty agents for quotes on insurance for the trucks have increased 58 percent in the same period. For GMT400 GMC trucks, values are up 52 percent, with 53 percent growth in insurance quotes.

Then I found this:

It was a listing for a manual 1989 Chevy K1500. The intro photo wasn’t great, as it cut the truck off, but the next photos showed quite a decent looking machine:

While finding reasonably-priced K1500s in decent shape isn’t too hard, I’m a manual-only guy, and manual 4×4 trucks have gotten really, really hard to find. That’s why this photo caught my eye:

Gorgeous! That brown and gray just works great together.

The downside — and probably the reason the truck was even still available — is that the truck was in a place called Tehachapi, CA. I’d never heard of it myself, but it’s about 100 miles north of my office, or 45 miles southeast of Bakersfield.

Intrigued, and fully aware that this was a smokin’ hot deal that would disappear if I didn’t act soon, I asked Autopian social media contributor Griffin if he wanted to go on a bit of a road trip (probably at least five hours in total). He said he was down, so after we swapped his C6 Corvette’s serpentine belt in the work parking lot, we hopped into the Autopian Pontiac Aztek and headed north to the middle of nowhere. In the dark.

The trip started with some traffic, but was otherwise a smooth two-hour cruise northeast into the desert.

I have to admit that, as we got closer to our destination, I felt a bit bad. I hadn’t really vetted the seller. He’d seemed normal on Facebook Messenger, but I didn’t call him on the phone like I usually do. And now I was dragging Griffin out to a mystery-person’s property in the middle of the desert, and I wasn’t sure Griffin quite signed up for this.

The seller gave me his address and a screenshot of his exact location, telling me to expect to have no service out there. This made me even less comfortable.

And to be clear, I’ve done sketchy things like this many times in the past, but those times I didn’t have a poor, innocent social media contributor with me, and I also didn’t have a wife at home who expects me to, you know, return in one piece.

“That’s my new AR-15” the seller told me shortly after I arrived at his huge property, pointing into his garage that was also filled with motorcycle and car parts.

He was a young guy, about my age.

“Yeah, I got too many cars. I just got that Nissan Frontier. Gets better mileage for my commute, which doubled thanks to this new job,” he told me. “It’s a good truck,” he said about the white 1989 Chevy K1500 I was there to see. “I just don’t need it….runs good, drives good.”

After he walked me around, he fired the truck up. The throttle body-injected 350 cubic-inch small-block Chevy V8 — the engine that powered the American spirit for the better part of 50 years — sounded perfect, idling and revving smoothly.

The gentleman offered me the keys, and off we went for a test drive around his local neighborhood, which consisted of dirt/gravel roads and humongous, spread-out private properties stretching as far as the eye could see.

The engine felt smooth and responsive. It wasn’t fast, but it felt like it could tow a hangar. The five-speed had huge throws, but the shifts were buttery, and honestly, everything felt good. Even the interior — which features power windows and locks — seemed to be in nice shape aside from the headliner. It needs a cleaning, but otherwise the whole vehicle felt like a respectfully-used 129,000 mile pickup.

We returned back to the seller’s abode after about a 10-minute test drive.

By the way, at this point, Griffin was nowhere to be found because I’d suggested he drop me off at the seller’s property. “If someone’s getting their organs harvested tonight, it’s not you. Just drop me off, and I’ll let you know if everything’s OK by giving you a signal with my headlamp.”

We agreed that a strobe was bad news, a solid beam was good, and no beam was also bad.” Then we realized that our iPhones offered a satellite text feature, so we tried that, and it worked!

After the test drive, I told the seller it was a nice truck, and asked if he’d take $5,000 for it. “I mean, I bought it for $5,000 with a trailer, so I basically got a free trailer; that’s a deal!”

I actually snagged the old GMT400 for $4,900 since the seller told me he felt bad for not having smogged the car prior to sale. And thus, I became a Chevy GMT400 owner.

The drive back to Galpin was amazing; right away it became clear to me why GMT400 pickup has become so legendary in American automotive culture. It’s not just the squared-off styling (which I think is a little on the boring side), it’s not just the classic American V8 under the hood, and it’s not just the ruggedness — it’s the perfect blend of just enough refinement to go along with a bone-simple, incredibly-capable machine.

The GMT400 K1500 is shockingly good on the freeway, cruising at 75 mph quietly and comfortably; the vehicle feels decades newer than my 1985 Jeep J10, whose ride isn’t quite as smooth and whose cabin at any speed north of 50 mph sounds — relatively speaking — like the eye of a small tornado.

 

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I still have a lot of inspecting to do to understand everything that’s wrong with this truck, so you can expect a “Here’s Everything Wrong With” article soon. I have plans to clean up the cabin (detailing, replace headliner), but I have some concerns about the transmission input shaft bearing. I’ll get into that later (I could be wrong and maybe it’s totally fine). For now, I’m in love.

I know these trucks were much cheaper just a few years back, but even at nearly $5 grand, this is a lot of truck. Don’t take my word for it; listen to Bob Seger!