Pickup trucks add luxury touches
Upscale amenities now common in vehicles ostensibly built for work
If the popular ’80s and ’90s TV show “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” was recast for 2018, pickups no doubt would mingle in the uber-fancy garages with exotic sports cars.
Imagine a hologram of the late Robin Leach marveling at the luxury appointments in a Ram 1500 or Ford
F-150 Limited or perhaps a GMC Sierra Denali. The fact that we can even suggest this hints at the sea change in the truck world.
Much was made last year of Ford’s
$100,000 F-450 Super Duty Limited pickup, but even with light-duty pickups, the kinds of touches once the domain of luxury sedans have found their way into vehicles that work for a living – even if plenty of pickups never haul more than groceries to and from their suburban haunts.
Luxury pickups can still get the lumber to a job site, but the ride there and back for the drivers and their crews might be accented by supple leathers, real wood finishes and heated and ventilated seats. All those extras don’t come cheap. A GMC Sierra Denali Ultimate, for example, tops out at about $67,000 with destination charges.
Care for a massage? Ford offers something called Active Motion, which is basically massaging seats. It’s standard on the F-150 Platinum and Limited trim levels and available on King Ranch.
Ford’s pitch: Active Motion “helps to reduce muscle fatigue and promoting blood flow on longer journeys, with a subtle massage for thighs and lower back.” Ahhh!
A branding iron? What if your idea of luxury is more about the little touches and less about working out the kinks after a long day? Authenticity might be what you’re after. Take the 2019 Ram 1500 Laramie Longhorn edition. How do you know you’re inside one of these trucks? Look for the cattle brand.
“Literally, it’s a hot branding iron,” said Ryan Nagode, chief designer for Ram, describing how a manual press is
used to brand the Longhorn name into the wood-trimmed upper glove box door. For the Ram 1500, the top trim levels are the Laramie Longhorn and Limited editions. But unlike the 2018 Ram 1500, there’s no Tungsten edition … yet. “We definitely have poured a lot of those detail things” into trucks, Nagode said. “When you say luxury … attention to detail comes to mind.”
That attention helped garner a Ward’s 10 Best Interiors Award for the
2019 Ram 1500.
The “full-grain, natural leather” in the Limited and Longhorn editions is a good example of what stands out.
“We’ve left the leather as natural as possible,” Nagode said. “It just makes the leather feel a little more supple.”
There’s also no vinyl, for instance, in the seats, and if you happen to sit in the back seats of the Longhorn – which recline, by the way – you’ll see satchel bags “reminiscent of a horse saddle,” Nagode said.
And there’s more. “Throughout the cabin, a new embossed alligator-skin pattern leather covers surfaces including the center console, instrument panel, seats and door panel inserts,” the company proclaims. And that center console, Nagode called it a hallmark feature, with
40 liters of storage and five USB ports.
❚ Heads up, buddy! When you’re towing a large load, you don’t want to take your eyes off the road.
So GMC offers a 3-inch-by-7-inch heads-up display for its 2019 Sierra Denali. The image, which is “height adjustable and dimmable,” is displayed against the windshield and can provide the driver’s speed as well as speed limit, turn-by-turn directions, altimeter and tachometer.
Michael Stapleton, director of design for GMC Interiors, called the first heads-up display in a pickup a gamechanger.
“It really makes a big difference on any drive because it just keeps your eyes up,” Stapleton said. “When you talk about the concept of luxury it’s about having the right technology in the right place.”
And what stands out about luxury truck customers?
“Their expectations are really high, and they’re spending really big dollars on these trucks,” Stapleton said.