One of the more annoying marketing ploys Chrysler relied on in the late 90s and early aughts is something that it still depends on today: Hyper Masculinity. Do you think the Hellcat is something new? Nope. They did the same thing with the Dodge Dakota roughly 20 years ago.

The Dodge Dakota is the closest Chrysler got to making a small sport truck, especially the R/T model (more on that later). In today's age of fattened doors and crumple zones that necessitate bigger frames, I suppose the Dakota is a small truck. Either way, what was most interesting is that the small-ish American pickup had an optional 5.9-liter V8. That is more displacement than the 5.7-liter V8 that was in the Corvette at the time.

The Dakota competed with four other trucks: The Ford Ranger (4.0-liter V6), the Chevy S-10 (4.3-liter V6), and the Toyota Tacoma (3.4-liter V6). That's the crux of my praise for Mopar: The Dakota was a mid-size truck with an available big engine in a body that kind of looked like the Big Daddy WWF Summerslam Dodge Ram.

The interesting thing about the commercials for the Dodge Dakota was that they were not hyper masculine. They were completely bland. Take a look at this commercial from 1997.

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The commercial is narrated by a Modern Marvels/William Lyman sound-alike—a pleasant voice with a general American accent. You expect a voice like this to tell you about the Hoover Dam. The commercial opens with bright-red Dodge Dakota pickups exiting large boxes as if they were the Jolly Green Giant's toys. The boxes are white, the background is white, and the trucks are red. The trucks line up in a row like they're in a prep school gym class ready for uniform inspection. Overlaid typeface, in a thin serif font, appears above the trucks. The numerals 4, 6, and 8 hover over the roofs, representing the different engine configurations. The commercial fades to black.

Dodge was trying to be sophisticated. It was all they could do because they didn't have "Like a Rock" by Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band. Chevy called dibs on that jingle. They couldn't get a man's man movie star in their commercials either, because legendary Western actor Jack Palance and his unflappable face and voice was working for Ford at the time. So they appealed to our love of displacement and glossed over the cheap interior.

The Dodge Dakota was a truck with a dash made from the same grade of plastic as your school lunch trays. Its suspension wobbled around and gave the truck less direction than an under-inflated soccer ball.

The Dakota I filmed for the accompanying video has 160,000 miles and was loaned to my volunteer from his father, a Mopar service mechanic. If it was a Toyota Tundra, mileage would be a non-issue, but this Dakota is falling apart. The column shifter clacked about. The truck pulls to the left under hard braking; it felt like the anti-lock was kicking back for no reason or maybe one of the rotors was warped.

My volunteer says that his dad only bought a Dakota because he knows how to work on it and scored a second Dakota as a parts truck. He's already pulled the transmission and transfer case from the parts truck.

The most enticing selling point of the Dakota, the V8, wheezed and threw temper tantrums while I held the transmission in second and asked the valves to handle engine speeds over 4000 rpm. I understand that the torque is quite good, but the promise of big displacement didn't deliver big fun, even with my expectations dialed back for age.

Maybe the excitement in driving a Dakota is all in the looks department, like a DeLorean.

The second generation Dodge Dakota bulged up its hood to look just like its varsity linebacker older brother, the Ram. This Dakota's length, with the extended cab, is 17.9 feet long and 5.9 feet wide. As I drove the truck, the bed rocked from side to side behind me—like a swaggering Beta Bro in the weight room—his arms held out as if he is carrying two invisible watermelons after mounting the 'ol Squat-'n-Grunt rack.

Yeah, the Dakota wanted to look macho, and I felt macho driving it in the Pennsylvania college town of Bloomsburg. But aside from the body shell and the V8, everything about the machine was 80s under the skin. I felt it. I felt old and redundant. I felt like a dad delivering a mini fridge to my son's dorm. Chrysler even delayed giving the Dakota a standard CD player until 2004 (just in time for the iPod).

However, the R/T package was a different story. It was a firmed-up version of the Dakota Sport. The R/T package got you usable springs and struts, an LSD rear, a stronger 46RE trans, and bigger brakes. This gave the V8 more reputable friends and a better GPA through positive peer pressure. The Dakota R/T offered way more grunt and drive-line competence than the Chevy S10 Xtreme and was way more interesting than whatever Ford was doing with their Ranger.

The Dakota made me feel like a dad, but not a cool dad. A sighing dad. A deflated dad. I felt like a dad who says "In my day. . ." and means it. I felt like a dad who is placing more and more of his hopes and dreams into the lottery. I felt like a dad whose eyes glaze over when he hears Steely Dan's "Reeling in the Years." I was a dad driving a Dodge Dakota with messed up alignment and knowing that the alignment can't be fixed until three pay checks from now. I felt like I had a son who I understood less and less every month. My ex-wife lives in Nevada.

The Dodge Dakota is a truck for driving into the sunset, but it's cloudy out.

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