Searching for the Best New Truck

There was a time when pickup trucks weren’t expected to do anything but backbreaking work. Some people think of those as “the good old days,” but I respectfully disagree.

Modern trucks are comfortable, luxurious and about as easy to drive as a large crossover. It seems that families now depend on trucks as much as contractors do. Yes, these tools of the road have adapted to meet new needs and that leaves us with a particularly tricky task: deciding which one is the best of the bunch.

For the 2015 AutoGuide.com Truck of the Year, we gathered four new or significantly updated pickup trucks that hit the market in 2014. This ended up boiling down to one truck from each segment. We tested the midsize 2015 GMC Canyon, the half-ton 2015 Ford F-150, the three-quarter ton 2014 Ram 2500 Power Wagon and the one-ton 2015 GMC Sierra 3500 Denali.

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To be clear, this isn’t a head-to-head comparison. We looked at each truck in the context of its own segment and set out to determine which one made the furthest advancement relative to its rivals. We used four key measurements to determine the winner: how the truck drives unloaded, how it handles a trailer loaded to 50 percent of its maximum towing capacity, how it handles off-road and how easy its features are to use.

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