Toyota cannot screw up the Tacoma.
that mutual excitement kept the conversation rolling. About 35 minutes after I asked Tacoma Chief Engineer Sheldon Brown “for a quick interview,” I shut my voice recorder off. Then we chatted another five minutes.
Everything that you see on the Trail Hunter, with the exception of that roof rack, is standard; It comes this way right from the factory. So that means as we look underneath there, you're gonna see we have a front bash plate. We've got a skid plate that protects the center body. Full fuel tank protection as well as a rear diff cover on here.
So these are areas where we think that we can be probably more competitive and provide value. The same thing goes where we can integrate accessories into the truck. If we can’t already provide access for rock rails, that's gonna be something that you're gonna otherwise have to modify, or drill holes in your frame, or do something else.
But we're also trying to think about what the customer is gonna want and how we can best provide that. Toyota has for a long time been committed to electrification across this entire lineup. And obviously trucks are some of our last vehicles to be able to come online. So electrification, at least in the hybrid area, was a no-brainer.
But what I think is gonna become more and more commonplace are vehicles with lower displacement and higher boost. Motors across all different automakers. So this is gonna be a little bit more mainstream. And if we really think about it, this is not like our first rodeo. Actually, you can go back a decade, decade-and-a-half and we've had turbos around.
That's 33% more life cycle and duty. We know because truck users are gonna be towing and they're gonna be hauling and you might be boosting a little bit more. So in those particular cases, we wanna make sure to meet those standards. So these things have been put through the ringer on the dyno, off the dyno, and in the real world. So by the time it gets to our customer, what I think they're gonna find out is they're gonna get more power, more torque, better fuel economy.
They love a basic truck and it meets all their needs. It doesn't have to have all the bells and whistles. So that was really the genesis in why we came up with extra cab, to make sure we could maximize efficiencies. We can take that value, pass that value along to our customer with a competitive entry level product.Yeah. That’s an interesting idea, that stratification. Most of the truck market isn’t heading that direction. Options are much more limited for powertrains and cab configurations.
But we made the tailgate aluminum. Took out about 30% of the mass. So we've tried to use our materials to spend in those areas that would have customer value. I've taken mass out of the deck side by making it aluminum, out of the tailgate.You’re talking about materials complexity that, for the customer, provides extra capability in a non-obvious way?Mmhmm. The resin molded deck is actually 20% glass-filled, so it's actually got better impact performance.
Obviously improving fuel economy and drivability, we heard that loud and clear our customers wanted a little bit better performance. I can't wait to get you in the seat of this truck. It's well-mannered.
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