Where did all the 4x4s go?

[Ricko1966]

^ Sure, but blizzards happen about as often as the US presidency changes seats (although I got to experience TX during that huge blizzard and cold snap a few years ago….what a shiiit show). And swamp land is very small % of the overall state.
Growing up in the upper Midwest, a large majority of trucks in the 70s and 80s were 2wd. You threw some weight in the back of the truck, aired down the tires and sent ‘er all winter.


Sounds like something my dad would say back in the day to justify why he didn’t need (translate, afford) a 4wd.
What you say is technically correct but an open diff 4x4 is about 10x better than a 1 wheeler peeler 2wd and several times better than a posi 2wd.

I won't deny 4wd is better than 2wd in certain conditions. But since the person I was quoting was talking about converting his 2wd to 4wd. I thought it was a far more practical solution to add a posi and good tires and see if it was good enough. That would be my first approach before I added a front diff, front suspension, steering, transmission, transfer case, linkage, 2 drive shafts and other Misc. My suggestion was try a posi and good tires and see if it's good enough.

 

[Grit dog]

I won't deny 4wd is better than 2wd in certain conditions. But since the person I was quoting was talking about converting his 2wd to 4wd. I thought it was a far more practical solution to add a posi and good tires and see if it was good enough. That would be my first approach before I added a front diff, suspension, steering, transmission, transfer case, linkage, 2 drive shafts and other Misc. My suggestion was try a posi and good tires and see if it's good enough.

Ya, I mean, if I wanted a 4x4 I’d just buy one. Work smarter, not harder.

 

[CountKrunk]

IDK if you know this but your average 4wd Chevy is really 2wd in the slick stuff. I front tire spins and 1 rear tire spins. If traction is problem, my first move would be a posi rear so both rear wheels are drive and a set of good tires for traction. Lots less money and effort and good enough for most people. Just don't drive a posi car like it's a Mustang.

Thanks Ricko. I added a trutrac to the build list.

Much easier to do that than convert it to 4wd when the truck doesnt really need it.

It's not an off road rig.

 

[CountKrunk]

Ya, I mean, if I wanted a 4x4 I’d just buy one. Work smarter, not harder.

I have one already. 3rd gen 4runner.

 

[Gander]

^ Sure, but blizzards happen about as often as the US presidency changes seats (although I got to experience TX during that huge blizzard and cold snap a few years ago….what a shiiit show). And swamp land is very small % of the overall state.
Growing up in the upper Midwest, a large majority of trucks in the 70s and 80s were 2wd. You threw some weight in the back of the truck, aired down the tires and sent ‘er all winter.


Sounds like something my dad would say back in the day to justify why he didn’t need (translate, afford) a 4wd.
What you say is technically correct but an open diff 4x4 is about 10x better than a 1 wheeler peeler 2wd and several times better than a posi 2wd.

I don’t know about that, winters in the panhandle of TX are harsh and Amarillo area gets a lot of snow every year. I’ve seen it first hand. I know there’s places that have it far worse and at least Amarillo is totally flat but they get a lot of snow and high wind up there in the winter. Agreed about your observation about 2WD vs open-diff 4x4

Also, I wouldn’t say that swampland is a small part of TX. I mean, a “small” part is still pretty big. I mean, Houston, the 4th largest city in the US, is built on drained swamp/marsh and everything east of it to the Louisiana border that isn’t paved over in concrete is all marsh/swamp/gumbo mud&clay mix/inland coast/waterways/bayous/etc. it’s 2 hours east from there to get to LA border BTW.

 

[Grit dog]

@Gander, I suppose the word “harsh” is relative. I’ve been thru a few somewhat harsh (by snow country standards) in TX, including being in DFW for 5 days beginning when the Great Freeze of 2021 happened. That was an actual chit show because of how cold it got (and my chitty brand new BMW red rental car decided to randomly lock 1 front wheel for hours at a time (and it wasn’t the brakes frozen, it was electrical). Good thing there was NO pavement that wasn’t coated with a healthy layer of ice n snow as I drove around for days, sometimes with 1 front wheel and one round ski, and no traction control or abs as that would fail when the system locked a wheel up hard. I actually drove it into a dry parking garage to try to break it loose and confirm it wasn’t just ice.)
That weather system was so bad that eventually we quit trying to get a flight and hijacked the rental and drove it to Albuquerque to get home.
But that storm is compared to the one in 1899, so I’ll stand by it’s only very rarely “harsh”. Like every 120 years lol.
Have drove thru plenty of snow on I40 and around the panhandle when we lived down that way. Meh, it’s snow. And it’s TX so it’s gone quickly. Nothing worth buying a 4x4 for.

 

[Bextreme04]

I only had a motorcycle and a 2wd Ford Ranger for the 4 years I lived in Prescott, AZ. We would get snow every weekend and ice on the road every morning during the winter. Drove my 2wd car around Germany for 2 winters also. Never had an issue. Places that have harsh winters tend to have the capability of clearing it enough to allow normal traffic to pass pretty quickly. When we have had some severe ice/snow storms here in Oregon it has only been a big issue because they have ZERO snow plows or cinder spreading capability in the Willamette valley because they get it so rarely. In 2017 we got 13" of snow overnight and it shut Portland down for 2 weeks. I was driving to work the next day like it was no big deal and there were only four of us that showed up to work(I drove my truck with automatic 4wd and several others drove trucks or AWD cars). I have only needed to actually engage my 4wd on the square a handful of times in the 10 years I've lived up here. Once was because I was trying to pull my travel trailer up a steep gravel hill with very bald BFGoodrich AT tires and the rear tires were spinning bad. I kicked it into 4lo and it crawled right up the road.

 

[Gander]

@Grit dog

Well, 4x4 is worth it to me, because that’s what I’ve got. Must be worth something to a lot of other folks down here because I sure do get stopped a lot and asked whether I’d sell it.

I should have been more specific when I said Amarillo and said everything within 200 miles of it. There’s nothing between Wichita Falls and Amarillo except a bunch of small cotton farming towns and I mean small, like the biggest town in that whole stretch only has like 5000 people and most towns have around 1k or less. That town with 5000 is Childress which is where my truck spent the 1st couple decades of its life. The freeway there is paved of course, and so are the roads in town, but all the “County Roads” are dirt and over the winter 4x4 is a necessity.

I wouldn’t live up there but know folks who do and it’s harsh out there on the panhandle on winter and with all the dirt roads they definitely do put 4x4 trucks to good use

Down here 4x4s are mostly for fun although there’s still a few real uses for them besides clearing ditches or seeing how deep you can go before you get stuck. We’re only an hour from the beach here and 4x4 with the tires aired down sure makes for a nice time. Can’t tell you how many 2 wheel drive trucks I’ve seen stuck on Crystal Beach. Truth be told, I’ve seen 4x4s stuck too where the driver didn’t know to air the tires down and in one case didn’t know how to shift into 4x4. We also have a lot of flooding events and hurricanes/tropical storms and that can make a mess of roads for days/weeks and it’s nice to have 4x4 in situations like that too. So there’s reasons for owning one down here beyond the “cool” factor which admittedly is the real reason hahaha!

 

[bigcountry78]

My dad and I had a discussion about this a few decades ago (yuck, getting old). Anyway, he told me that when these truck were new, especially the 70’s, people still had a negative view on four wheel drive. A lot of the older folks, my grandfather included, did not see where it was necessary. They didn’t want the added cost, and added perceived maintenance headaches that it would bring. For some reason, adding that extra drivetrain up front made people believe that the reliability wasn’t there and that it would cause more problems than it would solve. My grandfather would not buy a 4x4, he wouldn’t pay for it. He also wouldn’t pay for A/C, or a radio, or an automatic transmission. He just wasn’t having it. He was of the thought that mud grips on the rear axle was just as good. So in my experience, that plays into why fewer 4x4’s were sold in the first place. And then rougher lives and work environments came into play like everyone has mentioned.

 

[Bextreme04]

My dad and I had a discussion about this a few decades ago (yuck, getting old). Anyway, he told me that when these truck were new, especially the 70’s, people still had a negative view on four wheel drive. A lot of the older folks, my grandfather included, did not see where it was necessary. They didn’t want the added cost, and added perceived maintenance headaches that it would bring. For some reason, adding that extra drivetrain up front made people believe that the reliability wasn’t there and that it would cause more problems than it would solve. My grandfather would not buy a 4x4, he wouldn’t pay for it. He also wouldn’t pay for A/C, or a radio, or an automatic transmission. He just wasn’t having it. He was of the thought that mud grips on the rear axle was just as good. So in my experience, that plays into why fewer 4x4’s were sold in the first place. And then rougher lives and work environments came into play like everyone has mentioned.

My dad had a similar mindset. We had a 73 F150, 2wd with the granny low manual trans. We took that thing all over the southwest growing up. We had that truck into some stuff that would make a modern 4wd guy cringe and give up and never once got stuck bad enough to need a recovery. There were a few times that my brother and I had to get out and jump up and down on the bumper or push while my dad rocked it out of a sandy spot, but we would spend days out in the mountains around death valley crawling around old dirt tracks across mountainsides and all over bryce, canyonlands, and moab areas of utah with no issues. You just had to be smart enough(or lucky enough) to not get yourself into a bad situation.

 

[Grit dog]

My dad and I had a discussion about this a few decades ago (yuck, getting old). Anyway, he told me that when these truck were new, especially the 70’s, people still had a negative view on four wheel drive. A lot of the older folks, my grandfather included, did not see where it was necessary. They didn’t want the added cost, and added perceived maintenance headaches that it would bring. For some reason, adding that extra drivetrain up front made people believe that the reliability wasn’t there and that it would cause more problems than it would solve. My grandfather would not buy a 4x4, he wouldn’t pay for it. He also wouldn’t pay for A/C, or a radio, or an automatic transmission. He just wasn’t having it. He was of the thought that mud grips on the rear axle was just as good. So in my experience, that plays into why fewer 4x4’s were sold in the first place. And then rougher lives and work environments came into play like everyone has mentioned.

Sounds like my dad!
He’d take pics of where we took the ole Buick back in the woods to some lake or something and then tell us who needs a 4x4? Just gotta know how to drive!
He too would never ever buy a 4wd. Too much $ and “extra maintenance…
But to be fair we didnt have much money and all the maint and repairs short of rebuilding a transmission happened at home, on a creeper with jack stands and wood blocks (til I finally bought him a floor jack for Xmas when I was 12 or 13 because a bottle jack was a pain in the ass).
Just like I plumbed in a mop sink in our garage when I was in hi school because “ there was no need for another sink, we got a 2nd bath now with a door straight to the garage.” I was sick of mom yelling at me for getting the sink all dirty and leaving the can of Goop in the bathroom!

 

[Grit dog]

My dad had a similar mindset. We had a 73 F150, 2wd with the granny low manual trans. We took that thing all over the southwest growing up. We had that truck into some stuff that would make a modern 4wd guy cringe and give up and never once got stuck bad enough to need a recovery. There were a few times that my brother and I had to get out and jump up and down on the bumper or push while my dad rocked it out of a sandy spot, but we would spend days out in the mountains around death valley crawling around old dirt tracks across mountainsides and all over bryce, canyonlands, and moab areas of utah with no issues. You just had to be smart enough(or lucky enough) to not get yourself into a bad situation.

I also heard, “a 4x4 will just get you more stuck!”
He was right! I thought about him last year when me and my son got a Hilux rental hopelessly stuck below hi tide on a remote beach.
If it hadn’t of been for the ONLY people to drive down that way, a group of local kids out drinkin beer, I’d now own a lightly used hilux with some salty wiring and caved in passenger doors!
I thought, self, if you’d have gotten that chitbox car you were gonna rent and not taken the Hilux as a free upgrade, you would certainly not be in this predicament right now!

However thanks to Dad, I’m probably one of the last guys on the road to shift into 4wd in a snow storm and I’m a better driver for it.

 

[BigT]

Just my personal preference, but I won't own a truck that is NOT 4x4, and I prefer long beds. I also do not use the 4x4 that often, only when it's really bad out or when I'm off roading. My truck is my daily, and I use it like a truck, so I drive a truck that fits what I do with it.

 

[mxer147]

Perhaps this 4 x 4 warnings and directions scared off some potential buyers resulting in some rarity? I’m partial to three quarter ton 4x4 long beds and 2WD short bed squares, in all honesty, best damn pickup truck ever made for nearly 20 years mostly unchanged.

 

[bigcountry78]

Just my personal preference, but I won't own a truck that is NOT 4x4, and I prefer long beds. I also do not use the 4x4 that often, only when it's really bad out or when I'm off roading. My truck is my daily, and I use it like a truck, so I drive a truck that fits what I do with it.

There was a time when that was my mentality also. As I’ve gotten older, my use has changed. I still have a 4x4, for snow and such, but I wouldn’t turn my nose up at a nice 2wd, Silverado trimmed 87 shortbed. It would make a sweet cruiser/hauler for stuff. Stock stance of course, and got to have the rally’s. Oh and AC, that’s more important than 4x4 lol.