How the Pickup Truck Went From Working Class Hero to Luxury Lifestyle Accessory
Driving a pickup truck used to be about as pleasant as riding a steel girder. Unless you needed to haul a horse trailer, a yacht, or 10,000 pounds of fragile masculinity, there was no need to suffer the cheap plastics and bone-jarring ride. It was like using a chainsaw to mow the lawn.
Any of the Big Three automakers will tell you they invented the pickup first, but heavy-duty vehicles with open beds started appearing commercially around the end of WW1. They put horses out of work on farms