Toyota dealers want a small pickup truck—now

“We’re absolutely sold out of Maverick, and we’re sold out as far as we can possibly see, and it hasn’t affected Ranger or F-150 one bit,” Gates said in an interview with Automotive News. Gates holds the keys to a number of dealerships across different brands, including Ford and Toyota, so this anecdotal evidence apparently comes from his own stores. Gates feels a Maverick-fighter would not eat the lunches of Tacoma and Tundra.

Witness the entire creation of the Asüna brand back in the early ‘90s, when Pontiac-Buick-GMC stores were looking askance at cash being raked in by Chevrolet-Oldsmobile dealers who were permitted to sell Geo vehicles. And if industry lore is true, it was people who owned Jeep stores in the same era who help scuttle development of a slightly lifted Caravan with a roof rack and butch tires; rumour has it they were afraid of giving up sales to the van, a machine which could have been a foreshadowing of just about every crossover trim today with an off-road image.

For its part, Toyota is predictably mum on future product plans. [The only reply from official company channels is Toyota brand head Dave Christ telling Automotive News“We don’t have anything planned (…) But certainly, it’s something we’ve looked at.” —Ed.] The company is holding an all-hands dealer meeting in Vegas this week, where talk of a unibody pickup will surely rear its head. Hey, perhaps they could give this upstart builder on Prince Edward Island a call.