How the Toyota Hilux slipped past America's chicken tax
Imported pickups faced a 25 percent American tariff, but Toyota found a gap. From 1971 it shipped the Hilux without a cargo bed, paid just 4 percent on the cab and chassis, and had a California firm bolt on a locally built bed before delivery.
The Hilux began in March 1968 as a short-wheelbase truck with a 1.5-litre engine. Toyota conceived it, but the engineering and assembly were done by Hino Motors at its Hamura plant. The name, Toyota says, blends the words high and luxury, which made sense only beside the bare-bones Stout, a heavier workhorse that it eventually replaced in some markets. A long-wheelbase version followed in April 1969, though North American buyers waited until 1972 for it.
The tariff workaround started in November 1971. Atlas Fabricators of Long Beach, later renamed Toyota Auto Body California, received trucks from Japan minus their beds, built the beds and fitted them before sending the trucks to dealers. The 1973 model, nicknamed Rocket Hilux in Japan, brought a roomier cabin and, for Americans, a longer bed option.
For years Toyota offered no factory four-wheel drive on this truck, so a California company called Off Road Marketing filled the gap from 1975, converting two-wheel-drive trucks with mostly off-the-shelf parts shared with the Jeep CJ and selling the result as the Wolverine 4x4. A factory four-wheel-drive version finally arrived in January 1979. In 1981 Toyota teamed up with Winnebago and two other customisers to build fibreglass-topped SUVs on the Hilux chassis, and that work fed directly into the 4Runner, launched in 1984.
In North America the Hilux name vanished after 1975; the truck was simply called the Pickup, and later the Truck, while many owners referred to it by its popular SR5 option package. A limited run of 3,500 luxurious Mojave trucks, with bucket seats and no Toyota badges on the grille or tailgate, closed out that era. Since 2004 the Hilux has shared its ladder frame with the Fortuner and Innova, and by 2017 cumulative global sales had reached 17.7 million.
Source: Toyota Hilux
