Heavy Haulers

Chevy didn't just unveil the redesigned Silverado on a stage — they airlifted the truck in by helicopter in front of a crowd of owners, enthusiasts and the press.

When the all-new Silverado arrived for 1999, GM kept building the old heavy-duty GMT400 trucks alongside it for two more years before the GMT800 HD finally replaced them in 2001.

This Silverado brought back a factory option GM hadn't offered on a half-ton truck since 1980: a bare chassis cab, bed-less and ready for an upfitter's box or flatbed.

This Silverado swept both major truck awards in its debut year — North American Truck of the Year and Motor Trend's Truck of the Year, same truck, same year.

This was the last F-150 you could ever order with a manual transmission or the Flareside bed — both quietly disappeared from the lineup after 2008.

Ford bet the F-150 on aluminum body panels, the first mass-market American vehicle built that way.

The 2021 F-150's redesign changed 92% of its parts -- only the cab, bed structure and tailgate script font carried over from the previous generation.

This F-150 generation dropped the manual transmission for the first time ever — and its Flareside bed, retired at the end of 2009, was the last factory stepside pickup bed built, period.

This F-150’s 4WD hubs were designed to fail safe — if the vacuum system that unlocks them ever gave out, they defaulted to locked 4WD instead of leaving the driver stranded in two-wheel drive.

When this F-150 generation dropped its stepside Flareside bed at the end of 2009, it closed out an era — no major automaker has offered a factory stepside bed since.

To prove the new aluminum F-150 could take a beating, Ford secretly disguised test trucks as the OLD steel-bodied generation and ran them through the brutal Baja 1000.

This Sierra’s pickup bed isn’t steel like its Silverado twin — GMC built it out of carbon fiber to set the truck apart.

When this GMT900 Sierra launched for 2007, GM kept selling the outgoing truck alongside it, badged "Classic," so buyers could choose old or new side by side on the same lot.

This Sierra kept rolling off the line for a full extra year after its replacement arrived - badged "Classic" in 2007 just to tell the two generations apart on dealer lots.

GMC found 10 extra horsepower in the Sierra All Terrain X's 5.3L V8 with nothing more than a performance exhaust, no other changes needed to go from 355 to 365 hp.

The DS-generation Ram 1500 picked up a four-corner air suspension in 2013, then in 2014 added a 3.0-litre EcoDiesel V6 pitched as the industry's only light-duty diesel pickup.

The fifth-generation Ram 1500 replaced its predecessor's leaf-spring rear suspension with a coil-spring setup, a first for the light-duty Ram line.

For the first time in Tundra history, Toyota didn't offer a V8 at all — the truck that built its reputation on big naturally-aspirated power went all-in on twin-turbo V6s instead.

Toyota's Texas Tundra plant sits on land bought from the state's oldest working cattle ranch, and the 1794 Edition is named for the year that ranch was founded.