Luxury Pickup Trucks: A Brief History

The Early Days: Pickups as Proletarian Chariots

The origins of the pickup truck as we know it are a bit murky, as the early days of automobiles created an awful lot of different vehicles with cabs up front and beds in back — this, of course, being one of the general shapes of the horse-drawn wagons that inspired the first cars. In the automobile’s first few decades of infancy, when they were little more than horse-drawn wagons with motorized power, some vehicles like the Model T offered bare-bones cargo beds on select versions, but every car was largely suited to going anywhere and doing whatever was needed. The 1930s brought the Great Depression, and the 1940s the Second World War; neither proved boom times for the car industry.

By the 1950s, however, people were beginning to buy trucks not simply because they needed to, but because they wanted to. After all, while they might not match station wagons or sedans in terms of seating capacity or enclosed storage, they offered some appealing traits of their own: drivers sat higher, and felt more confident as a result; many trucks offered more ground clearance and four-wheel-drive, enabling them to continue into terrain that would hamstring lesser vehicles; and, if nothing else, they were different, and if the history of humanity has proven anything, it’s that sooner or later, different becomes cool.

By the time 1960 rolled around, trucks had appropriated car-like fenders and four-door cabs from conventional automobiles; by the 1980s, smaller trucks — first from Japan, followed by American brands — further popularized the idea of trucks as everyday vehicles and even fun toys. But as the century came to a close, car companies saw truck-based SUVs like the Cadillac Escalade, GMC Yukon Denali, and Lincoln Navigator begin to make headway in the luxury vehicle market long dominated by sedans, coupes, and convertibles. And they started to wonder … could pickups do the same?

The Rise and Fall of Luxury Brands’ Pickups

The luxury truck market technically began in the 21st Century, but its origins lie in the last days of the preceding one, with the debut of the Lincoln Blackwood concept in 1999. “Concept” was being generous by the standards of the era; it was, effectively, just a pickup truck version of the production Lincoln Navigator, which had gone on sale the year before and awoken America’s ravenous appetite for luxury-branded go-anywhere-do-anything machines. As such, it looked much the same from the C-pillar forward, but behind that sat a four-foot-eight-inch truck bed. Well, more of a cross between a bed and a trunk; it was completely enclosed, with a single-piece tonneau that hinged upwards like a sedan’s rear hatch and a pair of side-opening doors instead of a fold-down tailgate. Oh, and the exterior panels were made of African wenge wood — black, of course, to give the truck its name.

When the production version arrived in 2001, it looked all but the same, but the high-end wood body panels out back had been swapped for a plastic that replicated the look at lower cost. The enclosed trunk remained, however, keeping the rising lid and split sideways tailgate, and the interior of the trunk was lined in shiny aluminum and floored in carpet. Like the Navigator, power came from a 5.4-liter V8 making 300 hp; strangely, though, rear-wheel-drive was the only way to get that power to Earth.

Any hopes that the Blackwood would match the Navigator’s remarkable sales were quickly dashed, however. The vehicle proved a laughing stock in the press, and buyers never showed up; while the Navigator moved almost 44,000 units in its first full year on sale, the Blackwood languished in showrooms, prompting Lincoln to axe it after one model year and just 3,383 sales.

Lincoln took a second stab at the idea three years later, when the following generation of Ford F-150 had arrived. The Lincoln Mark LT still had a 5.4-liter, 300-hp V8 under the hood, but now, there was a choice of two- or all-wheel-drive, making it a more appealing prospect for buyers who lived in cold-weather climes. (Also, it had an actual pickup bed, although one rimmed with brightwork at the very top.) It sold better than the Blackwood, moving roughly four times as many units in its best year of 2006, but the numbers tumbled from there; production wrapped up once and for all in 2008.

Cadillac, meanwhile, had its own truck plans. The second-generation Escalade had entered production in 2001, but the following year, Caddy rolled out the Escalade EXT pickup. It also used an unconventional bed, but in a different manner than the Blackwood; like the Chevrolet Avalanche it was twinned with, it offered what GM called a “midgate” — a way to fold away the divider and glass between cabin and move the rear seats out of the way to create a longer bed, albeit at the expense of opening the occupants to the outside air. Power came from a 6.0-liter 345-hp V8, and unlike the Blackwood, all-wheel-drive came standard.

It came out of the gate strong, with 13,494 units moving in its first year, but EXT sales began a gentle downward arc the following year that continued until the model’s discontinuation in 2014. Still, it did well enough (and, with so much shared between the Escalade SUV and Avalanche, was easy enough to make) to earn itself a continuation into the third-ten Escalade along the way, with that model arriving in 2006 packing a 403-hp 6.2-liter V8, fresh styling — and, of course, a midgate.

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High-End Pickups Find Success With Everyday Badges

But while General Motors and Ford Motor Company’s luxury divisions were struggling to convince truck buyers to enter showrooms catering to the DeVille and Town Car audience, other players —both within those companies and outside them — were working to bring premium features to the pickup world. (And these upper-class upgrades weren’t limited to the traditional “half-ton” pickups that make up the majority of sales, either; Ford, Chevy, GMC and Ram would all go on to roll them out to heavy-duty machines, as well.)

Ford’s first effort came in 2001 with the arrival of the F-150 King Ranch, a new top-shelf trim level paying tribute to America’s biggest cattle ranch that came with real (and delightful-smelling) saddle leather upholstery and a full crew cab cabin, a feature that previously had been relegated to heavy-duty pickups. That same year, General Motors rolled out a new top trim of the GMC Sierra, called the C3, which packed all-wheel drive, a stronger engine, and a nicer interior than other Sierras; by the following year, the C3 name was axed in favor of Denali, which has stuck around since.

Things shifted into high gear a few years later, however. In 2009, Ford followed up the Blackwood and Mark LT with the F-150 Platinum, boasting the luxury features expected of a body-on-frame Lincoln but paired with a badge better associated with truck-dom. Toyota followed suit with its own Platinum trim for the Tundra shortly thereafter. 2012 saw the arrival of new range-toppers for the Chevrolet Silverado and the Ram 1500, but while the others named theirs after fancy metals, these went for Americana, with Chevy calling theirs the High Country and Ram dubbing theirs the Laramie Longhorn Limited. Ford then responded with an even higher F-Series trim level called Limited, sitting above the Platinum.

Ram then pushed their pickup’s luxuriousness to yet another level in 2018, with the arrival of an all-new truck offering both air suspension for a smoother ride and a mild hybrid V8 for a smoother power delivery alongside an available 12-inch vertical touchscreen. By this point, Limited had split off into its own trim level, matching Ford. Ford, in turn, pushed past Ram with a more powerful hybrid engine of its own for the new F-150 that debuted in 2020, one that combined six cylinders, two turbos and an electric motor for truly impressive straight-line speed.

Toyota responded with its own variant above the Platinum, but rather than follow the Limited pack, it chose to name its new capstone trim, well, Capstone. GMC, meanwhile, continued General Motors’ pursuit of pushing upmarket with a two-pronged assault, consisting of the Sierra Denali Ultimate in 2022 and the Sierra AT4X in 2023— the former serving as a superior Denali that pushed luxury to near-Escalade levels, the latter a more off-road-focused trim that also ladled on the fancy features.

Then in 2024, Ram delivered yet another escalation in the pricey pickup back-and-forth, opting to name its new trim after another metal: the Ram 1500 Tungsten. Not only did it deliver new levels of interior luxury and style, but it also brought parent company Stellantis’s new turbocharged inline-six to the table, giving it the smooth, easy power normally associated with BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes. It’s the last word in high-end pickup trucks … at least, until another carmaker raises the bar yet again.