Pickup Truck Market - the truck industry's "hidden gold mine"

Recently, pickup trucks have been getting more and more attention. The personalization and high-end play of pickup truck products also began to appear more and more frequently in the world’s major markets. In the year of 2018, Mercedes-Benz officially launched its first pickup truck, the X-Class, which started the trend of high-end pickup market segment. The pickup truck culture also began to slowly show the trend of spreading from North America, Southeast Asia, Australia and other Pan-Pacific regions to Europe and China. For example,  the Cannon series of pickups release by Great Wall Motor has gained a very high degree of attention. It is reported that in the future, the Cannon Series of pickups will become an important product of Great Wall Motor in the field of high-end pickups, and will be pushed to the private car consumer market with the image of a playful party.

So, such a question comes up: what kind of culture is pickup truck culture?

Strictly speaking, the birth of the pickup truck is not too long, post-war North America is the fertile ground for the growth of this segment of the product. With the end of the World War II and the return of a large number of US soldiers, North America, which had not suffered much damage in World War II, quickly ushered in a new economic takeoff, and the farm economy, which had been left out because of World War II,  burst into life again. Which had been left out because of World War II, burst into life again.

In 1948, the Ford F-Series, known as the progenitor of the modern pickup truck, was officially launched, and it was at this time that the Ford F-Series saga of sales in the global market began. Compared to the Pre-World War II trucks with a classic car configuration, the Ford F-Series added some personalized and playful elements to the instrumentalized premise with integral wings, an enclosed cab, and a cargo box close to the cab style. In addition, the seating position and ride comfort in the lineup were close to those of passenger cars, constituting a configuration between commercial vehicles and passenger cars. In other words, from this period onward, the modern pickup truck defined by the Ford F-Series was no longer a “grimy” truck. The post-war baby boom and the rise of hippie culture followed, and the For F-Series was quickly embraced by young people in the 1950s and 1960s. The scene of Forrest Gump being chased in the movie”Forrest Gump” is a good example of the status of the pickup truck in American society during this period.

The fundamental reason for the popularity of pickup trucks in North America is that this image between commercial vehicles and passenger cars is well suited to the natural environment of the North American market, which is sparsely populated. The attributes of a utility vehicle provide great convenience for consumers located in the Midwest. On the contrary, in the crowded European and Japanese markets, pickup trucks have not been well developed, instead it is the vans in these two markets are very popular.

Before the 1980s, the pickup truck configuration is basically evolved on the basis of the Ford F-Series, that is, the structure of the single-row seat long cargo box. This structure also influenced the look of SUVs based on pickups for some time, which then had one or two doors, semi-enclosed bodies and short wheelbases. It was only after the 1980s, as the global economy took off again, that pickups evolved into the double cab configuration and, of course, became larger. As Japanese cars entered the North American market in the 1970s,pickups influenced by Japanese car styles began to be born. Compared to the rugged North American pickups, the Japanese pickups were obviously more sophisticated and refined. This delicate, small and economical Japanese pickup image, with the North American market as the soil, began a round of expansion to the global market process. In South America, Southeast Asia, South Asia and even Australia, the compact Japanese pickups started the pickup culture in these regions.

So, to this day, we can probably also divide the pickup truck configuration and pickup truck culture according to the region. As the starting point of global pickups, the North American market has clearly distinguished between tool pickups and passenger pickups, and there are also such divisions in the pickup configuration as heavy-duty pickups, size pickups, medium-sized pickups, etc. For the sake of illustration, let's take the most popular pickups as the most popular.  In order to clarify the problem, we take the most common North American passenger pickup truck as the focus, to see the North American market pickup culture.

Influenced by the hippie culture, the Norther American pickup culture will obviously emphasize more on the personalized side, and the North American market, the characteristics of the vast and sparse population, the North American pickup culture also emphasizes more on the long-distance crossing comfort. This can be seen in the high performance pickups in North America, such the Ford 150, which has a Platinum version that emphasizes road-going performance, and the Ford F-150 Raptor, which we are most familiar with.

 The essence of pickup truck culture lies in the fact that it provides a comprehensive and diversified platform, offering consumers more possibilities to realize lift scenarios. With the continuous development of China’s auto market and the lifting of the ban on pickup truck policy, this kind of personalized products will certainly usher in a tidal wave of development.