|
Tundra gets 4 doors for '04
New Double Cab is biggest, roomiest truck Toyota has ever built
By Tom Mack
Thursday, September 25, 2003
After several years of fielding complaints for its not-quite full-sized Tundra pickup, Toyota has performed a mid-life makeover that brings the vehicle up to scale with the competition. It also gets four real doors.
By extending the stout ladder-frame chassis, the 2004 Tundra Double Cab gains a substantial 330 mm in total length (to 5842 mm overall). The Double Cabs wheelbase has also grown by more than 30 mm over the basic Tundra, while adding an extra 76 mm of rear wheel track and a similar increase in overall height.
With these extensions, Toyota claims the Double Cab is longer than its Nissan Titan, Ford F-150 and Dodge Ram Quad Cab 4-door rivals with their standard beds. But it is shorter than the Chevrolet Silverado 4-door in basic trim.
Chevy and Dodge both offer optional extended beds with longer wheelbases and overall lengths than the Toyota. Toyota also redrew the Kentucky-built pickup to give it a taller beltline and greenhouse, and it deepened the bed by just over 100 mm to a more workable 526 mm.
"The challenge was to build a truck this big and still fit it in a garage," says Tundra chief engineer Motoharu Araya. "We had considered making the cabin bigger, but keeping the wheelbase the same size and shrinking the bed. But the rear overhang would have been huge in proportion."
Toyota didn't scrimp in the cabin, which Tony Wearing, managing director of Toyota Canada Inc., describes as "having the most comfortable rear seating in its class." The original Tundra Access Cab had been knocked for a lack of rear-seat room and the uncomfortably upright rake of its seats.
Toyota claims the Double Cab has more rear legroom than either the Dodge Ram or Ford F-150, and a gentler rear-seat rake than any other pickup. In addition to the extra comfort and roominess, the Double Cab sports the segment's first standard vertical power sliding full rear window with defroster. The rear glass is similar to the power sliding window on the full-sized Sequoia SUV in design and operation. With about 48 square metres of total open area, it is more than four times larger than the manual sliding rear windows in the Regular and Access Cab models. Combined with fully retractable power windows on all four doors and an optional power sliding moonroof, the new Double Cab offers a real feeling of space and roominess.
A 60/40 split rear seat tumbles forward to provide more interior storage space and expose hidden compartments.
"We are still doing our homework about what truck buyers want," Araya says. "Some want a car-like interior, but a pure truck driver wants a tougher image. I would like more buyers to change their minds from what the Big Three have inside to what Toyota has."
But the Tundra still needs to make up ground in a couple of key areas. Its 245 hp, 4.7-litre V8 derived from the Lexus car lineup generates less horsepower and torque than the competition. The Nissan Titan has a 5-speed automatic while the Tundra retains a 4-speed. And with a maximum towing capacity of 6,800 lb, the Double Cab comes up more than a ton short of the other entrants. But Toyota engineers think that amount will be sufficient for their buyers, who will mostly be towing motorcycles, snowmobiles or personal watercraft, not yachts.
"Customers want a bigger V8, but we also have to achieve good mileage," Araya says. "That's the tradeoff. We have to determine what size is best for fuel economy and power."
Toyota executives admitted to being caught short on the Double Cab wave when they launched the Tundra in mid-1999.
"A little more than three years ago, there wasn't a single full-sized, half-ton, double cab pickup on the market," says Jim Lentz, Toyota vice-president of U.S. marketing. "This year, they'll make up nearly a third of the segment." He predicts that double cabs will account for more than 40 per cent of all full-sized pickups by the end of the decade.
Toyota marketers also have identified a new demographic for the Double Cab: truck moms. This group, which not surprisingly was identified in Texas, is made up of mothers who wouldn't be caught dead in a minivan or SUV, but who want a pickup truck with room and civility.
Toyota expects to sell over 120,000 Tundras to North American buyers in '04, of which half will be Double Cabs. Final pricing won't be released until closer to the November launch date, but an educated guess says it would be in the $38,000 to $45,000 range in Canada.
Toyota plans to kick off its marketing during the Thanksgiving weekend football games, to be followed by its entry into the NASCAR truck racing series in 2004.
With files from Automotive News. Copyright 2003 Crain Communications Inc.
All rights reserved.
| 
