Home Forums Gear Hunting Trucks and Four-Wheel Drives When Did Factory 4x4's Reach Their Peak?

Must be nice to live where you can wear out vehicle before it rots out. 4X4 vehicles hit their peak in the early 90's. They were still affordable were intended for work. No heated seats, low ride, big wheels with little tires, they were not status symbols yet. 1990 F150 XLT Lariat, 4X4, 300 6cyl, 5 speed, tilt, cruise, air, $13,100. Even had headliner and carpet. Well the carpet was wussyfied.

No, what happend is factory 4X4's took off in different directions based on consumer demand for more choices.
I've been driving on bad roads and under really bad conditions since 1960. Back in the 60's, BTW, the toughest and most reliable 4X4, the favorite of the ranchers that lived in the really remote areas like the Nevada Deserts was the British Land Rover. Had a good friend who caught more really big trout and shot more really big muleys, like over a dozen 30 inch bucks, who had one. Trust me, that little Landy had features that allowed it to work in spite of difficulties that no vehicle has had since. Features like a hand crank to start the engine if your battery was dead. A double hard top for hot weather confort. A telescoping fuel tank funnel/filter that would even filter out water from one's gas cans. Magneto ignition, remote oil bath air filter, stop cocks on the water cooling lines. Nobody has made anything like that since.
But they are long gone. FourWheeler magazxine tested the latest fancy Land Rover with something like 500 HP. Every comfort item known to man, and some I'd hadn't even heard of. But your $80,000 dollars didn't get you even one skid plate to protect the underside.
But we do have some very good, very reliable off road vehicles that can easily handle anybody's hunting needs. Somebody has already mentioned some of todays pickup trucks. With some carefully chosen options, they work well.
My favorite is the current Jeep Wrangler. Again, with carefully chosen options/packages, they can make almost anybody happy. You can remove the doors for more visability and easier access in or out. You can still lower the the windshield if you want. The tops remove, even the hardtops.
You can make an argument that a ATV can go lots of places easier. When the weather is nice, they are pretty comfortable. But when the weather gets nasty, like very cold, very hot or just plain wet, they are pretty tough on the user. They don't have the range or the load carrying abilities of the Wranglers. And a well equipped Wrangler can go any place they can as long as it will fit. E

you can still get a real truck that has just enough doo-dads to make it a comfortable without turning it into a monstrosity. i bought a '15 f250 XL FX4 super crew shortbed with manual hubs, manual t-case, locking rear diff, skid plates, plow prep, tow packagem power windows, locks and cruise control, 385 hp 6.2 gasser with 6 speed auto, rubber floor mats and thats it. yes it has a lot of electronics/computer crap but thats unavoidable these days. i love it so far. it is comfortable but still a truck that i'm not afraid to work and take offroad. i think these are the good old days for trucks. for all the rosy memories of the 60's and 70's trucks, those things were junk for the most part. rotted, blew oil and didn't last long without a lot of work.

In a way I tend to agree with the last posts by E and rem141r..

Those old LandRovers were great and many good features as already mentioned, but they were far from perfect..

Roll forward today, and like rem141r, todays 4x4's have many improvements, excellent corrosion proofing and far better build quality being the two most obvious ones..

What we really need is for company's to offer vehicles that incorporate the best features from by gone times with best of todays design and technology.

It saddens me to say it, but on the civilian market here in the UK, currently only Jeep offer models that come anywhere close to that, with some of the base model Jap pick-ups being a distant second..

Ask someone in auto marketing and they will tell you the women as a whole do the car/ truck shopping/ choosing if you will. This happened in the late 80 early 90s. That's when standard cab trucks got scarce and every lot was full of ext cab and 4 door freight trains... So components got lighter in favor of the frills.

I'm pretty happy with my current Jeep Wrangler. It gets me where I need to go. This is the second to the last year for the JK models. Who knows what the future holds for the 2017 models.

I had a 1979 Dodge short wheel base the same color as yours. It's still my favorite truck.

My first truck was a 73 Chevy 1/2 ton I thought it was the greatest truck ever but now it was the biggest hunk of [bleep] ever compared to today's trucks. A lot of you wish for the good ol days have you ridden in one lately? I will take my 2014 f250
Xlt fx4 over any of them. Only thing I use a 70's anything truck for is to build a swamp buggy for moose hunting.

I still have what I think was one of the best 4x4 pickups. Just cant afford to drive it but if gas continues to go down I just might pull it out of the shed. 1979 F250 Ford. Love that truck. Has C6 auto 351M 3:54 axle ratio. Factory tool box built into bed. Tall and skinny 16 inch tires. Thinking 12 valve Cummins conversion forthcoming.

Let's not talk about how gutless they were too hell you had to sneak up on a hill at night In them. I think most guys pulled the motors and rebuilt them to get some more hp and yanked all that smog crap off them. Now that 96 bsa had with the 12
Valve be nice to have.

That's screaming for a 12 valve cummins conversion!!!! I'd go to lower gears and some taller tires too, while you are at it...

This has been a great read. I find it very interesting that many of the comments have said great things about the Ford 300 six. I had two 4wd trucks with this engine and they were both extremely reliable,but absolutely gutless and not great on fuel. I do recall that the 4 speed that was the best of the two. The 5 speed never seemed to be geared right for anything. I don't have any experience with the auto trans and the 300 6. Both of mine had big rebates if you bought a manual. I never touched the motors beyond basic maintenance. The bodies also held up fairly good. I grew up in Ford family and would have been disowned if I had bought another brand.

If you like Fords, check out the Ford Raptor.
When 4Wheeler Magazine tested one of the first ones, they jumped it over 20 times w/o damage. Nobody else makes one that tough.
On second thought, unless you've got $50,000 burning a hole in your pocket, maybe you shouldn't. E

The carbureted Ford 300 I6 was the real deal. A great engine with all the power I would ever need and it seemed to make good power at most every sane RPM. The EFI version of it was a gutless P.O.S.. I owned both. I was so disapointed in the EFI version I only kept it about a year. When I drove it on the GMC lot the guy looked at the model year and said, "I don't think we are going to be able to get you out of this at a number you're going to like." My reply was "Try me."

I was always impressed by a Land Rover, one of the guys from Australia had, and posted about from time to time when I spent my time over on Accurate Reloading...

He lived in the outback somewhere in Oz...on a large sheep station or something like that... which has been in the family for quite a long time, well before WW2...

The vehicle was a 1955 Land Rover with a Diesel in it, that his dad had bought new in 55....they had no idea how many miles was on it, as the speedometer cable had broken many decades ago...

but where they lived, a speedometer wasn't an issue, as it hadn't seen alot of asphalt in its lifetime....and 50 to 55 mph was about flat out in it.. which was also fine for a life of dirt roads and off roads for a farm vehicle...

This is one of the ones with the spare tire on the hood, or bonnet as the Limey's love to call it...

at least back in 2008 or 09, that 1955 diesel was still running and had never been rebuilt or replaced...

I thought that was kind of cool...

In 86 I had a new Ford F 150 4 x 4, with the 300 Six in it..and the 4 speed granny tranny...started it out in second all the time..

75 mph was about flat out...on the highway that thing got pretty much 12 mpg...pulling an 8,000 lb boat/trailer, it got about 11.9, was carbed and it did not have much variation...

one time with time on my hands, I got in a driving MS Daisy mode and drove it from St Louis, back up to Minneapolis, on old US 61, 63 and US 52.. driving it at 45 mph all the way... with the engine turning 2,000 rpms, instead of the usual 3,000 rpms at 55 mph...it gave me 19 mpg....

drove it out to Seattle also, doing the same on old US routes... where it gave the same mileage...


One Sunday evening in August, I was in a long line of vehicles at a boat ramp on Lake Minnetonka, waiting to pull their boats out... a ramp that you could usually pull 3 boats out at once, was taken up by ONE vehicle that was trying to pull a boat out, that took up the entire ramp...it wasn't legally trailerable, but it was being pulled and taken to somewhere to have the motor overhauled and repairs done on it over the winter....

Probably should have been pulled out by a Semi, but instead some guy was pulling it out ( or attempting too) in a Ford F 350, 2 WD dually... across his bug guard he had written in big letters...460 CI!!!!

all he was doing was burning the tread off the rear tires and smoking the hell out of the ramp... the boat was not budging... people were getting pretty irritated...

my truck was the next vehicle on deck, so I asked him if he wanted me to hook my truck up to his trailer instead to pull it out.. he was so frustrated with all the people yelling at him, he said yeah, lets try it...

so we hooked the trailer to my truck, I put it into 4 Wheel Low Lock ( mine has posi in the rear)..put the trans into first and gave the engine about 1200 rpms and eased the clutch out...

walked right out of there without ever spinning a tire...with a cheering crowd of people who wanted to get their boats out and go home...

pulled it to a spot to swap his trailer back and he is just excited as hell.. "how big of an engine ya got in that baby??"

With the evening he was having, I didn't have the heart to tell him it was a 300 6 cylinder, so I told him a 429....

With that Trans, the old goose neck shift, and 4 Wheel low and the low end torque of those old 300 6s, that puppy had a lot of grunt to it...


my brother had an 81 he bought used that was one of those old Urban Cowboy ones, that Ford sold after the movie was out and everyone wanted a pickup and cowboy hat.. it was an F 100 on a station wagon frame and 2.47 rear axle, with a 3 speed OverDrive trans...even in flat Minnesota, they couldn't maintain 75 on even the slightest incline...the torque on those old 300 6's was the only thing that could take that lousy trans and axle set up for the mileage they were trying to milk out of them....

finally had to replace the engine, as the old one had too much piston slap and wasn't worth rebuilding...got an engine out of Plum City Wisconsin, from a farm rebuild shop down there...for $800 for a long block...

Turned out the engine, was a 1958 300 6... In Minnesota, ( at the time at least) with pollution inspection, standards went to the year of the engine, not the year of the vehicle... so it was exempt from smog testing..

built to 1958 standards/compression, did that engine have a tons more get up and go as compared to an 80s standard engine...and unsmogged, got a lot better fuel mileage also...

minus that 80s twin I beam suspension which ATE tires up front, the rest of the way that 86 was built, was pretty darn tough...

that 1958 standard 300 6 would have been a great engine to drop down in there...