- The third-gen Toyota Pickup was the first to offer four-wheel drive from the factory and helped popularize small off-road pickups.
- The factory graphics seen here are an early version of what became Toyota’s famous striped racing livery, later seen on Ivan Stewart’s trucks.
- Very clean but not entirely original, this truck looks showroom fresh, but you won’t feel guilty enjoying it in the wild.
Toyota began selling fun, frugal, and famously durable compact pickups in America in 1964, but it wasn’t until 1979’s third-gen Toyota Pickup that it found its modern small hauler formula. That spring, for the first time, the four-wheel-drive Toyota Pickup rolled onto dealer lots, and soon after onto dirt trails and dunes. Now it could actually take you to the kinds of remote deserts and mountaintops so often depicted in 1970s mini-truck ads and keep up with Jeep CJ-7s once there. Buyers loved it, and the same recipe underpins today’s Tacoma.
This 1981 Toyota Pickup 4×4 Deluxe up for auction on Bring a Trailer—which like Car and Driver is part of Hearst Autos—harks back to this early era of the Toyota off-road truck in more ways than one.
The vivid paint scheme, likely designed by Rollin “Molly” Sanders, a longtime Toyota graphic design consultant who later helped create the Lexus “L” logo, is an early version of what became Toyota’s famous striped racing livery. In the 1970s, Sanders had designed custom schemes for earlier Toyota pickups, including a couple of Yamaha promotional collaborations, the “Yamahaulers.” In 1981, Toyota offered two versions of this scheme on its 1981 and 1982 Sport Trucks, blue or red with yellow and orange stripes.
By 1983, the stripes had become the company’s racing livery, and the scheme would be forever associated with Toyota Pickups thanks to the off-road successes of Ivan “Ironman” Stewart. Though there aren’t too many pictures from the time, Stewart’s earliest Toyota racers were actually third-generation models.
Toyota did a lot of homework to create the third-gen pickup (the old Hilux name was dropped in the U.S. after 1976), including closely watching dealer and consumer reactions to an authorized four-wheel drive conversion of the previous pickup, the rare 1977–78 Toyota Wolverine. Dealers, like California’s Downey Toyota, sold the Wolverines as fast as they could be built. No doubt this informal test directly influenced the third-gen truck’s design, led by veteran Toyota engineer Minoru Oya.
America’s vast appetite for Japan’s small trucks also played a part. When it arrived, the third-gen truck felt more tailored for American tastes than any previous Toyota truck, with a much larger-feeling cab. The cabin materials were still basic but much improved, with more sound-deadening and passenger-car-like niceties such as intermittent wipers. Early models used the 90-horsepower 2.2-liter 20R four, but after 1980 the pickup was upgraded to the 97-horsepower 2.4-liter 22R, which is what’s under the hood of our BaT pick.
The big-feeling cab and new styling no doubt helped it fend off an early challenger, the 4×4 Chevy LUV (neé Isuzu Faster). When Car and Driver compared the two in 1979, it found the LUV’s independent front suspension gave a much softer ride than the Toyota’s solid axles and leaf springs, but Chevy’s cabin was very cramped. Similar sentiments applied to Subaru’s BRAT, which had arrived in 1977. The BRAT was nicer to drive on the road, but the Toyota was roomier and more of a proper truck. Nor did Toyota hesitate to play up the four-wheel-drive pickup’s familial ties to the Land Cruiser.
Legendarily indestructible, these trucks were cheap four-wheelers and basic transportation for years, but nice ones command serious sums these days.
This truck isn’t 100 percent original, with a replacement bed, some recent paintwork, and a variety of other upgraded parts from SR5 and Deluxe trims, but it isn’t fully restored or restomodded either. In a variety of ways, it’s the best of both. You get the period look and feel without having to feel too precious about hitting the dirt in it.
The auction ends on March 5.