I drove a $53,000 Toyota Tundra pickup to see if it's on par with Chevy and Ford trucks — here's the verdict

Toyota Tundra

The Toyota Tundra is typically the fourth-best-selling full-size pickup truck in the US.
The Tundra is aging, but it has a reliable design that's up against new pickups from the Detroit Big 3: Chevy, Ford, and Ram.
Despite its age, the Tundra is a great pickup that is notably easy to drive and, in an upscale trim package, comes with a lot of luxurious features.

In the world of the full-size pickup truck, the Ford F-150 rules the realm. Its perennial challengers are the Chevy Silverado and the Ram 1500.

You could be forgiven if you thought this massive US market was a trifecta, full stop. But there are other large pickups in the land. And they are worthy.

The worthiest is the Toyota Tundra. While Toyota sells just about 115,000 of these every year and Ford moves close to 1 million F-150s, the Tundra is no slouch when it comes to pickups. Among those in the pickup-truck know, Toyotas are considered more or less indestructible.

You buy the F-150 because it's ... well, because it's an F-150. You might own a dozen in a lifetime.

You buy the Tundra if you think you might want to go to your final reward having owned just one truck.

That's an exaggeration, but not far off. You do have to make some trades. Trucks from Detroit's big three automakers can be lavishly luxurious these days, while most Toyota pickups we've sampled at Business Insider have been sort of bare-bones.

And then a tasty Toyota Tundra 1794 Crewmax, tipping the cost scales at about $53,000, landed at our test center in suburban New Jersey. It was different. Very different.

The Tundra has been around since 2000 and has amassed a loyal following, even as it fails to seriously compete with the big three. (The current generation arrived in 2007 and was updated in 2014, making it a pretty old platform.) That certainly doesn't mean Toyota doesn't take the Tundra seriously. In a week of driving it around — with a nice long run to the Catskills in upstate New York thrown in — I found out why.

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