When did pickup trucks get more expensive than cars? More recently than you probably think, and the difference might not be as much as you think.

When did pickup trucks get more expensive than cars? The answer isn’t simple, but let’s start with some background. Once upon a time, you could make a case supporting a generalization that, in any given size class (subcompact, compact, mid-size or full-size), pickup trucks were cheaper than cars.

Although up to now I had never looked at enough data points to thoroughly assess this generalization, I recall having an awareness of it as far back as the early to mid 1980s.

Since trucks did not have anywhere near the mainstream popularity back then that they have today, in some ways it seemed almost like a well-kept secret that trucks were cheaper than cars. Although I never owned a truck in that era, I was in on the secret.

In my struggling student years, when I’d get tired of the unreliability of some of the 70s American jalopies I was driving, I would sometimes peruse the dealer ads in the newspaper, see the “one at this price” promotional offers, and marvel at how low the prices of brand new, base model, single-row-seating pickup trucks seemed in comparison to the new sedan and coupes that would have interested me in that era.

For instance, in 1986 the lowest MSRP for a Chevy S10 was $6,999, whereas Celebrity 2-door coupe started at $9,170, and a base Camaro at $9,685. Even though base pickup trucks in that era were spartan to say the least, seven grand for a brand new, decent-sized, rear-wheel-drive vehicle with a warranty was certainly an appealing idea compared to the alternatives.

Just a little over $700 more could get you into a full-size base Chevy C-series pickup at the time—still well below the cost of a decent-sized passenger car with a six-cylinder or better engine, especially with a rear-wheel drive powertrain.

I also had another example of the concept from a few years earlier, when a high school friend managed to save enough money from his part-time McDonald’s earnings to buy a brand-new Chevy Luv truck (which of course is not exactly the most respected model among truck guys) for under $5,000 cash. But I ended up never pulling the trigger on new vehicle during those years and made due with 70s jalopies until 1990.

The fact that I would now love to have some of those 70s jalopies back is another story.

Now, let’s fast forward to today. With all the press attention being paid to how expensive fully equipped pickups are, with loaded $60,000-$70,000-plus F-150s and Silverados supposedly getting out-of-reach for the traditional truck-buying demographic, one might conclude that today’s car vs. truck price differential is drastically different and has been for a long time.

Realizing that my sense of the issue was largely anecdotal, however, I decided to take a look at some data points to see if I really knew what the bleep I was talking about. In recalling a day when trucks seemed to be more accessible to the everyday working stiff, a day when “trucks were cheaper than cars,” I wondered if it was every really true. Maybe I was actually just looking at the past through rose-colored glasses.

The answers I found were mixed. And, of course, any conclusions you can make are inevitably affected by the data points you select. For instance, what models does it make sense to compare when you’re assessing the prices of passenger cars vs. pickup-truck—bearing in mind, especially, that a base full-size sedan is likely to be a lot “less base” than a base pickup of a certain vintage?

With those uncertainties in mind, I decided to start by taking a look at Chevrolet. As it turned out, I quickly found that, at the base level, at least, you don’t have to go quite so far back as my mid-1980s anecdotes to see significantly lower price points for trucks.

Even more surprisingly, however, I found that, for both Ford and Chevrolet, the phenomenon of the lowest price for a full-size pickup being higher than the lowest price of their largest full-size sedan is recent indeed. 

For starters, though, let’s turn the clock back 30 years and compare the lowest MSRPs of the Chevrolet Silverado pickup and the last two generations of the Chevrolet Caprice in the U.S. consumer market. I was surprised to find that the truck prices were lower by a wider margin than I would have expected.

Also counter to my expectations, with these two models a phenomenon of full-size pickups getting more expensive than full-size cars was not yet evident, even well into the 1990s. The table below shows starting Chevrolet Silverado MSRPs from 25.5 to 33.9 percent lower from the 1989 through 1996 model years. So you could still make a case for the “trucks are cheaper than cars” principle.

In this eight-year period of pricing history, the “cheaper-truck” phenomenon holds up even at the higher trim levels. 1996, for example, the most expensive Caprice—a wagon with a long list of luxury appointments—clocked in with an MSRP of $22,405 compared to a 4WD 1996 Silverado with an extended cab for $20,998.

But in our current decade, with all he headlines about $60,000-plus price tags for heavily loaded Silverados, RAMs, F-150s, the situation is drastically different—right?

Not necessarily. I went into the data expecting to see full-size truck prices exceeding full-size passenger car prices by a significant margin from the beginning of the decade. Surprisingly, however, that isn’t what I found when it comes to the base prices. Higher base MSRPs for trucks don’t show up until 2015 for the Chevrolet Silverado vs. the Chevrolet Impala, and not until 2018 for the Ford F-150 vs. the Ford Taurus.

But when you dive deeper into the data, you quickly see what all the hype surrounding truck prices is really all about. To see it, you have to look at what happens as you move up the food chain of trim levels.

For the 2019 model year, even though the base MSRPs are only $355 apart, the MSRP of the most expensive F-150 is $70,560, compared to $42,975 for the most expensive Taurus. The truck price has jumped from only 1.3 percent higher at the base level to 99.2% higher for a truck with all the trimmings. Granted, the $70,560 F-150 is a very different truck than the $28,155 version. The top-priced F-150 is the Limited trim level with 4-wheel drive, a SuperCrew cab, and a 450-horsepower 6-cylinder engine. But is it really over $40,000 better?

Nevertheless, if you jump back to 2010, when the cheapest F-150 was over $3,000 cheaper than the cheapest Taurus, you can see that the gap has widened. At the top level, the 2010 Ford F-150 checked in at $46,740 for the F-150 4WD SuperCrew Harley-Davidson edition, compared to $37,770 for the all-wheel drive Ford Taurus SHO—the truck was only 23.7 percent higher.

You can talk all you want about upgrades in technology, horsepower, and amenities that have occurred since 2010, but from where I sit it’s still difficult to look at a gap that has widened from under 24 percent to nearly 100 percent and not conclude that the increase is staggering. It’s tough to make the case that a fully loaded F-150 is really twice as good as a fully loaded Taurus.

But here’s the “glass half full” side of the story that’s easy to miss if you don’t dig deeper than the headlines: if you just need a reliable workhorse with one row of seating and a generously sized bed, you don’t need to pay the $50,000, $60,000, $70,000-plus prices that are making the headlines. You can still get a full-size pickup for under $30K.

The 2019 Ford F-150 XL, for example, starts at $28,155. You won’t get a state-of-the-art infotainment system with Bluetooth, but today even a base truck is luxurious compared to the base trucks of, say, 20-30 years ago, which might not have even had air conditioning as a standard feature.

Now, if you do work that requires carrying a crew of five with you to job sites, or if your lifestyle genuinely requires a vehicle that can combine work and family duties on evenings, weekends and vacations, then you do get into the more expensive trim levels that, depending on the trimmings, could get you to that $70,000-plus price range.

But consider this: for far less, you could buy a base 2019 Ford F-150 and a base 2019 Ford Taurus (yes, Taurus still exists, even though Ford has announced that 2019 is the last model year). For just under $56K at the base MSRP for both vehicles, you’ve got yourself a nice work truck and a nice family sedan. For some, that’s a nice garage in one easy package.

Clearly that formula that won’t work for everyone. But if a $70,000-plus pickup is within your budget reach, why not buy two nice vehicles instead of one, for a total ticket that’s nearly $15,000 less?

If more people made choices like that instead of paying the headline-grabbing prices for fully loaded trucks, it just might make enough of a business case for Ford and GM to re-think their sedan-cutting decisions. And that would make a lot of car enthusiasts very happy.