Nine of the weirdest American pickup trucks

Often referred to as the grandaddy of performance pickup trucks, the Li’l Red Express wasn’t the first truck to get a massive V8, but its 225bhp 5.9-litre powerplant and twin exhaust stacks made it stand out in a country where muscle cars were hamstrung by the Clean Air Act.

In the late 1980s, the Dakota pickup wasn’t selling. To drum up interest it shipped Dakota Sports to the American Sunroof Corporation where they had their tin tops replaced with a canvas roof and a single roll hoop. It erm... didn’t sell well at all.

The Super Sport Roadster was another attempt at a convertible pickup truck, although this was the early 2000s so Chevrolet gave the SSR a folding hard-top roof and rubbish styling. Early versions used a 5.3-litre V8 that made 300bhp, but it wasn’t quick or practical. And it cost $42,000...

The excellently named Hennessey VelociRaptor takes a standard Ford F-150 Raptor and makes it bigger. For just under $400k you get 50 per cent more wheels with actual 6WD, plus a 3in lift kit for the suspension and 37-inch off road tyres.

The Tesla Cybertruck arrived with its first customers in late 2023 and immediately became the oddest truck ever to be put into production. Obviously there are the looks and the stainless steel finish, but there’s also the fact that you can buy a tri-motor variant with 845bhp.

Based on the ‘High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle’, the Hummer was a civilian version of the US military vehicle that largely came about thanks to pressure from Arnold Schwarzenegger. You may not remember that it was available as a proper two door pickup.

Cab forward, flat nosed design was key to Ford and Chevrolet in the early 1960s. The Corvair 95 was rear engined and available in ‘Rampside’ form which added a ramp so that you loaded it up from the side of the truck.

The very first double cab pickup truck in the US was the 1957 International Harvester Travelette. In the 1960s, GMC outsourced production of its crew cabs to coachbuilders, and apparently just one was specced like this... with a massive nine foot bed.

Turns out electric pickup trucks aren’t a new idea after all. Back in 1997, General Motors took a regular cab S-10 and fitted it with a detuned motor from the doomed EV1 and a 16.2kWh lead acid battery for a range of 33 miles. It was only offered for two years and fewer than 500 were built.