The evidence has been there all along. I've owned 11 cars over the last seven years, and I only genuinely miss one, my dilapidated old E30. In the same time span, I've owned three trucks. I miss the first two dearly, even if the LX470 I had was the worst financial decision of my life. And the third one is this $2500 Tahoe, which I love more than the rest of them combined.
Even as a kid, I was obsessed with trucks. I'd force my dad to take me to the Toyota dealership, just so I could sit in the back as he test drove the new body style Tundra back in '07. I'd ogle ever Land Rover Discovery with desire in my heart, as I still do, an itch I may have to scratch even if it kills me. But a decade of reading car magazines, meeting other car people, and playing Need for Speed convinced me that sports cars were the way, the truth, the light.
But my Tahoe taught me that they aren't, at least not for me.
I do enjoy sports cars, and taking my near-perfect supercharged 2016 Miata to the Southern California canyons is a consistent treat. That, however, is the crux of it. A sports car feels like an indulgence to me, a silly, delicate thing to own alongside your real workhorse. The real hero is the tool that does the actual work.
Because cars are a lot of things; They're aspirational items, pleasure crafts, status symbols, sanctuary pods, engineering experiments, and more. For me, though, my lifelong love of cars is rooted in the belief that they are the best tools ever invented. Simple.
My Tahoe provides the perfect example: A 22-year-old truck, with still unknown miles, and no paint, found baking out in the desert. To most people, the Tahoe looked ready for the crusher. But it isn't built like some high-strung European car or crappy American econobox. It's built to work. So it does.
It roars to life every time, its V-8 ready to burble away the day or roar up a mountainside with four passengers and hundreds of pounds of cargo. It barrels through the California desert, enabling great camping adventures and from-a-movie memories. It demolishes miles at 80 mph, even if it demolishes gas in the process, and is so quiet and comfortable that you could cover a thousand in a day. Its fun is not in the direct experience it provides, but in the indirect way it enables experiences.
Brand new it was an everywhere machine. These days, the 4x4 truck may need some work to get you there, but you won't find a cheaper or easier thing to fix.
The Tahoe's mission statement now is as simple as in 2001. The Tahoe takes all of the people and gear I could bring wherever I want to go. Its low-range gearbox and limited-slip differential mean it'll press on when the going gets too tough for a crossover, its construction means you don't have to sweat the beating, and its ubiquity means wrenching solutions are well-documented and incredibly cheap.
It is a machine that demands no special accommodations, no delicacy in your operation. Surely the Miata could handle a trip to the desert, but it'd be one of avoiding dirt roads, of leaving friends behind, of ditching the camping gear.
I'd stay in a hotel, or, worse, not at all. I'd miss out on the endless stars in the pitch-black sky, the better trails at the end of the dirt roads, and the memories of a four-person trip into the wilderness. In the Tahoe, I haul a roof tent, and I don't bring a ladder because I can walk right up the sun-scorched hood. It's a beat up old tool, and it doesn't need to be babied.
In day-to-day life, I could drive the Miata, too. Sometimes I even prefer it. But then I go to surf, and the only way to haul my board is straight-up in the passenger seat. Bad for security and for protecting the fragile seats, already showing wear at 40,000 miles. I can take it to my girlfriend's place, too, but the traffic means I'd rather take the lazy Tahoe. I can do an airport run, but only if there's one passenger who didn't check a bag. On the weekends, I can head to the mountains for a drive. Or I can throw a cooler, or a bike, or my friends in the Tahoe, and head to the same mountain for a hike, and have a genuine, shared experience in nature.
If the goal is just to drive, the Miata is the unchallenged answer. Always has been. But the more time I spend driving, the more I realize I never saw it as an end to itself. Driving for me is a way to shrink the world. I respect people who use a sports car for that, loading up Miatas and MGs for cross-country travel. But when you have to plan around the car, you have to shrink your ambitions. The journey becomes more about the car and less about what's actually out there.
The more time I spend in trucks out West, the more I realize what I can find out there is more than I've ever felt from a car itself. It's Yellowstone in the summer, or the Alps in the fall, or Zion in the winter. And because I want to get out there consistently, I need something that can handle hard miles, haul all of the people and gear I need, and take us far from paved roads. I need something that you can fix in the tiniest shop in rural Utah, or the parking lot of an AutoZone, and that'll keep driving even when it's a little bit broken. I need something built not to provide fun, but to enable it. That's what trucks do, and why I can't help but love them.
Arguably the most fickle member of the Road & Track staff, Reviews Editor Mack Hogan is likely the only person to ever cross shop an ND Miata with an Isuzu Vehicross. He founded the automotive reviews section of CNBC during his sophomore year of college and has been writing about cars ever since.
