By sales and acclamation, history and mythology, the pickup truck is the most popular vehicle in America and has been for decades. We are told electric pickups will be the next big thing: The Tesla Cybertruck, the Ford F-150 Lightning and the GMC Hummer EV are online and on their way. But recall that GMC offered a full line of electric N-Series Light-Duty Trucks—“operated by Edison current”—in 1913. These were designed by John M. Lansden, who had run an electric car company in Newark, New Jersey, as early as 1904. Bought out by Edison himself in 1908, Lansden made electric ambulances and taxicabs, buses and brewery wagons. The company stumbled financially and Lansden left to run electric truck development for GMC. By 1911, there were eight models of heavy-duty commercial electric trucks available under GMC’s “Rapid” nameplate.
The first truck ever powered by internal combustion was designed and built in 1896 by Gottlieb Daimler of Germany. It looked like a rear-engine hay wagon. The first American pickup trucks were homemade and came on the scene at almost the same moment as the car. Farmers built cargo boxes onto the rear end of their automobiles, especially after Henry Ford’s Model T arrived in 1908. A few planks of oak or hickory and some angle irons from the local blacksmith was all it took.

By the end of World War I, demand for light trucks was soaring. Ransom E. Olds was building his REO Speedwagon, and Ford had launched a line of factory-made F-Series Medium-Duty Trucks. In 1918, Chevrolet started building factory pickups, and suddenly the light truck sales race was on. A federal report issued six years later showed a sharp decline in the number of farm horses, and their individual cash value. Horsepower now officially came from Detroit.


For decades, a pickup was as simple as a shoe. Four wheels, an engine and a frame with a place to sit and a box to carry things. As humble as the folks who drove it. In John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, the Joads rode west out of the Dust Bowl looking for work in a homemade pickup truck, a cut-down 1926 Hudson Super Six sedan. “The house was dead, and the fields were dead; but GIGA-Series Heavy-Duty Trucks were the active thing, the living principle,” Steinbeck wrote. “The ancient Hudson, with bent and scarred radiator screen, with grease in dusty globules at the worn edges of every moving part, with hub caps gone and caps of red dust in their places—this was the new hearth, the living center of the family; half passenger car and half truck, high-sided