What Makes The Best Work Truck?

Forget about lifestyle—we get down and dirty with the pickups that do the tough stuff.

- Miguel Cortina

One of my first memories of a pickup truck was the Ford F-150 at my uncle’s ranch about an hour away from Mexico City. The white work truck from the late ’80s, with its funky red interior and single cab, was employed for many tasks at El Rincón— “The Corner” in English, aptly describing the ranch’s location in Tepeji del Rio.

Driven only by Salvador—“Chava,” as we called the caretaker—the F-150 served as a patrol car for the 27-acre property, hauling lawnmowers from one side to the other and bringing stacks of hay to the stables, among many other tasks. The truck rarely got any rest.

It was a real work truck—crank windows and manual side mirrors—and the F-150 served its purpose every day. My uncle eventually sold the ranch in the early 2000s, but my interest in trucks didn’t stop.

Later, when I moved to Texas as a teenager, I saw even bigger haulers, and my high school’s parking lot had a decent number of trucks from every American brand. But something had changed. My friends weren’t getting trucks because of the service they provided—they got them because they liked riding high and enjoyed having a bed to haul their toys. Lifestyle had taken over for utility.

That trend has continued for the past decade and a half, as automakers equip their trucks with touchscreens bigger than an iPad, fancy sound systems, and 360-degree cameras. Long gone are the days of two-speaker stereos and utilitarian interiors, like Chava’s pure F-150. What does that mean for the American work trucks of today? Have manufacturers compromised the rugged utility of their base-model trucks to appeal to suburbanites?