From the May 2015 issue

In 1987, my parents bought their first new truck, a Dodge Ram D150. The Big Dodge Ram, as it came to be called, was so sparsely equipped that it should have come with a vow of celibacy. It had a manual trans hooked to an overtaxed 95-hp slant six. You sat on a bench seat and your headrest was the glass immediately behind your noggin. For options, it had stripes.

As a kid, I thought it was the coolest truck in the world. As a teenage driver, my opinion was probably a little different, but the Dodge served nobly during the winter months when my IROC was encased in an ice fortress. No, the Ram wasn’t four-wheel drive. But I’ve found that if you drive fast enough toward an obstacle, it’s kind of like having four-wheel drive.

Now, not to sound like Grumpy McGrandpa, but these days trucks are different. Of course, they’re way better. But they’re also way more expensive. The Ram cost $9995, which means that today it would cost a little less than $21,000. A few months back I drove a rear-drive, cloth-seat Chevy Silverado V-6 that cost $36,000. Extended cab, not even a four-door. Throw four-wheel drive on it and you crowd the price of a Mercedes-Benz C-class. Lord, won’t you buy me a Z71 4x4?

This is a pickup truck. It is not fancy. It can haul hay.

And that’s what you pay for a modest truck. I just drove a Ford F-150 King Ranch that cost more than $60K. The cowboy motif—evoking the wide-open spaces of your wallet—isn’t really my thing, but the EcoBoost King Ranch is one gorgeous truck. It’s got twin turbos and an aluminum body, just like the new Ferrari 488GTB. The seats were heated and cooled and trimmed in the supplest of hides. When you’re helming the (heated, multifunctional) wheel of the mighty King Ranch, all other drivers are knaves. Bow down before my LED headlamps!

One time I drove the Ram through a chain and didn’t notice. The school had a new chain across one of the parking-lot entrances, but there was no flag or sign on it, so I didn’t see it as I pulled in. I heard it, though, as the Dodge’s chrome front bumper casually tore the chain from its concrete stanchions. There was no apparent damage to the truck. Can you drive a new F-150 through a chain? You probably could, but I bet you’d feel bad about it.

And therein lies the dilemma for the new-truck buyer. Trucks are so very nice, and so expensive, that you get anxious using them as trucks. I used a $62,000 GMC Sierra 2500 Denali to haul a yard of gravel for my driveway, and cleaning out the bed took me twice as long as the trip to get the gravel. Somehow I got rocks inside the tailgate, so I had to take that off, which meant wrestling with the wiring harness for the backup camera. The harness isn’t quite long enough, almost as if GM figures that nobody will ever need to remove a Sierra Denali tailgate for the purpose of pebble extraction. And on that count, they’re probably correct.

Excessive fanciness might even make your truck the object of ridicule. A couple years ago I drove an F-350 to a Patriots game, and my parking space was too narrow for the Dumbo-ear outside mirrors. So I hit a button and conveniently telescoped them in, the sight of which caused a nearby tailgater to point and laugh. It doesn’t feel good to get laughed at by a guy in a Starter jacket.

2015 GMC Canyon

Now, you might point out that nobody is forcing you to buy the Rancho Supremo Rodeo Master Cowpoke Deluxe version of your favorite truck. Every company makes a basic work truck, but it’s ever so tempting to pile on the options. Even when I’m indulging in the make-believe of online configurators, I have a hard time resisting. I begin with a basic truck and then start saying: “Well, I’d want the V-8. And four-wheel drive. And I’d probably get at least an extended cab. And the locking differential would be nice. Bedliner and trailer package, obviously. And when you’re hooking up a trailer, a backup camera is really helpful, so let’s get the convenience package. Does that come with satellite radio? No?” And then I check the option for satellite radio on the imaginary truck that I’m not buying because, even hypothetically, I can’t stop myself from spending big dough on a pickup.

This is why I’m a bad person to consult for truck-buying advice. Recently, a friend told me he was looking at 2015 GMC Canyons and wondered what other trucks he should try. I told him to check out a few full-size models, too, because a leftover Ram or F-150 might slum it down into the Canyon price range once all the discounts are figured in. And he dutifully drove a Hemi Ram, an F-150, and a Silverado. A few days later he texted me a photo of his new truck: a $23,000 Canyon, four-cylinder and manual transmission, two-wheel drive. It’s about the most basic new truck you can buy. And he loves it.

I admire his honesty, his self-control, his acknowledgment that you don’t need to roll around in a jacked-up battlewagon just to haul a stepladder or a few bags of mulch now and then. His truck is rational, as the Big Dodge Ram was in 1987—just enough truck, no more. I respect that. But me? I would’ve sprung for the Hemi.

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