Sam Wedll has been driving his Toyota Tacoma pickup on the rugged roads of Northern California for seven trouble-free years, racking up almost 100,000 miles, so he’s interested in the redesigned version of the truck coming later this year. He paid $34,000 for his truck in 2016, loading it with plenty of options. He’s eyeing the new gas-electric hybrid Toyota Motor Corp. is going to offer, but Wedll, who does his own repairs, isn’t interested in paying luxury prices.
“The hybrid is pretty interesting to me because I like the idea of the fuel efficiency,” says Wedll, 47, a casino operations manager in Blue Lake, California. “I’m just trying to save some costs wherever possible.”
The Tacoma, known as the Taco to its legions of loyalists, is the leader of the pack in midsize pickups, one of the fastest-growing auto markets of the past decade. With outdoorsy weekend warriors and do-it-yourselfers looking for a truck that could fit in their garage, sales of midsize pickups more than doubled from 2010 to 2020. General Motors Co. and Ford Motor Co., which abandoned the market segment when sales slowed early this century, returned with new trucks to take on the Tacoma, which has dominated the medium truck market for almost two decades.
