10 Of The Worst-Selling Pickup Trucks Of All Time

To understand why some pickup trucks fail in the marketplace, it helps to consider the qualities of a good pickup and why failed models fell short. Traditional pickup trucks utilized body-on-frame architecture, typically with cabs and beds attached to ladder frames, offering ruggedness, easy repair of body panels, and resistance to twisting under high-torque missions like towing heavy loads. Many of today's workhorse pickups still employ this type of design. Plus, pickups offered the versatility of the open bed, safety advantages due to size and ride height, and generally higher ground clearance than most passenger cars — ideal for work sites and off-road use.

Many of the trucks on our list fall short on one or more of these counts and sometimes on all of them. For instance, some are car-based, which can make for a cool, sporty pickup that's as easy to drive and park as a car, or it can make for a more versatile car with its pickup-style bed, but it won't serve both roles well. Some of these models are tiny and give away any safety advantages that trucks can offer from size, weight, and commanding views of the road. Some would be completely lost on any surface more challenging than a wet road. And others on this list were just too strange for their time and place.

Some of the following pickups are decent vehicles for their intended niche, but the niche was just too small for high sales. At least one started out with decent sales but fizzled after a redesign. And some just missed the crest of a wave and got left behind by changing market preferences. Absolute sales figures can be hard to pin down, especially in older models, so the following list is presented in approximate chronological order rather than by sales.

The Willys Overland company attempted to arrest declining sales with the Jeep FC Forward Control, a highly unconventional but also very utilitarian cab-forward pickup truck. This configuration put the seats above the front wheels, creating a flat-front vehicle like a miniature version of a cab-over semi-truck, which is distinct from a normal semi. It caught on more with the military than civilian drivers, but its design would influence trucks like the Ford Econoline pickup that came out a few years later. The Jeep pickup was available as the FC-150 short-wheelbase version and the FC-170 long-wheelbase edition. There were also military-only versions, including wagon-bodied models that could be used as ambulances or panel trucks.

The FC-150 was powered by the classic Jeep CJ's 72-horsepower "F-head" four-cylinder, which produced 115 lb-ft of torque. For more heavy-duty applications, the FC-170 came equipped with a 105-horsepower inline-six engine that generated a decent 190 pound-feet of torque. The FC-170 also sported wider axles and offered a dual-rear-wheel option. Equipped with the optional T-98 four-speed transmission and dual rear wheels, the FC-170 had a gross vehicle weight of 9,000 pounds. Four-wheel drive was standard on all models.

The new truck was launched with fanfare and generated some initial excitement, but in the long term, sales were never electrifying. The FC had a few weaknesses, including the fact that the cabin could be very noisy. Plus, their cab-forward design made them nose-heavy and potentially terrifying to drive on a steep downhill stretch due to drivers' justified fear of tipping over on the truck's nose. This was partially rectified with an added weight in the rear. The FC was discontinued after eight years and became a highly sought-after collectible, especially in its rarest military versions.

The Studebaker corporation happened to be better known towards the end of the company's long history for unconventionally beautiful cars like the bullet-nosed Starlight coupe. Yet, it did have a history of building military and commercial trucks. They also introduced a pickup truck in 1949 that was past its expiration date a decade later, necessitating a new model. Borrowing a shortened version of the name of the company's long-running Champion sedan, the new truck was dubbed the Champ.

The Champ also borrowed the front half of a car, the roughly mid-sized Studebaker Lark sedan, making this an early example of a car-based truck. The Lark's body was installed onto the chassis of the previous-generation Studebaker pickup to create a semi-new model. The Champ got a new pickup box in 1961, but since Studebaker was struggling financially at the time, it bought these truck beds from Dodge. It wasn't the most harmonious marriage, since the Dodge back ends were noticeably wider than the Studebaker front ends, but the Champ's designers made the best of things by calling it the "Spaceside" bed. This awkward design reflected — and perhaps helped to cause — the Champ's overlooked place in pickup history.

For its debut year, the Champ offered a range of six-cylinder and eight-cylinder engines, including 259 and 289 V8s. In 1961, its base V6 received an OHV head, which bumped horsepower nicely from 90 to 112 but which quickly developed an unreliable reputation. The Champ's introduction briefly boosted sales, but its dated chassis and unreliable reputation quickly caused those sales to decline. The Champ only lasted until 1964, and what happened to this ungainly pickup happened to Studebaker automobiles in general two years later, when the company went out of business.

In the early 1960s, Ford's Econoline platform was intended to be a jack-of-all-trades, serving as the basis for a work van, a passenger van, and an oddly configured forward-control style pickup. It took inspiration for its snub-nosed appearance from the Jeep FC Forward Control and the Volkswagen van. With much of its weight ahead of the front axle, these trucks looked like they could tip over forward quite easily – and indeed, they sometimes did. A vintage advertisement for the rival Chevy Corvair pickup (which was also a forward-control truck) shows the Econoline tipping onto its front bumper under hard braking. Although, since it's a Chevy ad, the video needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

Indeed, this ad's existence shows that forward-control pickups like the Econoline, the Corvair, the Jeep FC, and the Dodge A100 were having a moment. Today, they have a certain Jet Age retro-cool factor, and indeed, we chose the Econoline pickup as one of our best Ford truck designs of all time. With the addition of a 165-pound weight over the rear axle to counteract its forward tipsiness, the Econoline pickup was a decent truck. The Econoline was considered a mid-engine model because the engine was between the seats, compared to the rear-engine configuration of its Chevy rival. This gave it the advantage of a flat load floor along the entire length of its 7.5-foot bed. 

On the downside, it never offered a V8 model, being powered instead by a choice of straight-six engines. Fuel efficiency was good, making it a favorite of some fleet customers, but sales to individuals never caught fire. After selling only 2,000 Econoline pickups in 1967, Ford canceled the model.

Mazda's REPU, or Rotary Engine Pickup, sought to bring Mazda's iconic rotary engine technology to the small pickup game. It never quite caught on, and only 15,000 examples of this rugged little pickup were ever sold in the USA. This earned it a spot on our list of the rarest pickup trucks ever built. Still, it remains a favorite of Mazda fans a half-century later, especially on the West Coast.

The REPU staked its claim to being the only rotary-engine pickup truck in history with its 1.3-liter, 4-port engine with a four-barrel carb. Mazda's engine technology, often called the Wankel engine after its inventor, Felix Wankel, differed from piston engines in its fundamental architecture. Piston engines feature pistons that move up and down in a reciprocating fashion inside banks of cylinders, driven by a sequence of compression and ignition. By comparison, in a Wankel rotary engine, a triangular rotor spins continuously within its combustion chamber while fuel is injected through ports in the housing and ignited to push the rotor. This offers continuous power delivery without the energy that piston engines lose on the upward compression stroke.

The REPU produced decent power with a smooth delivery, according to reviews at the time. It was also a handsome truck with squared-off fender flares matching its boxy but well-proportioned body. Unfortunately, it was just too different for mainstream acceptance, and Mazda soon discontinued it.

Subaru's cute and quirky BRAT micro-pickup is an example of a vehicle whose fame was out of proportion to its tiny sales figures, which peaked at around 23,000 for two years before plummeting. By its last year, it sold only 12 units in the USA, prompting Subaru to discontinue the pickup. Yet, it remains a favorite in the memories of many enthusiasts. The BRAT was car-based, sharing a platform with the Subaru Leone station wagon, but it aspired to be a true off-roader. Its name was allegedly an acronym for "Bi-drive Recreational All-terrain Transporter." Its cult-classic status makes it highly collectible, and you might be surprised at what a BRAT is worth today, with auction results running as high as $20,000.

One of the BRAT's most unique features is a pair of rear-facing seats in the bed, with their backs up against the back of the cab. This allowed Subaru to claim that the BRAT was a passenger car rather than a pickup truck, thus avoiding a 25% tariff known as the chicken tax that Uncle Sam imposed on imported pickups. This muddies the waters regarding whether the BRAT is actually a truck; the tax man says no, but if you take away the seats, he would say yes. Of course, exterior seats would never fly in today's hyper-safety-conscious era. The late 70s and the 80s were a different time, man.

The BRAT had other tricks up its sleeve. There was a hidden side step into the bed, and the spare tire was under the hood behind the engine. Four-wheel drive was standard, of course; this was a Subaru, after all. Among this rugged little trucklet's fans was President Ronald Reagan.

Next up is another car-truck, the GMC Caballero, a vehicle that pretends to such refinement that even its name means "Gentleman." The Caballero's allegedly rowdier Chevy twin, the El Camino, is so well-known that it even got a Breaking Bad movie named after it. The statelier GMC Caballero, however, has been all but forgotten. The two vehicles looked so similar that a casual observer might mistake a Caballero for an El Camino, which only added to the Caballero's anonymity

The Caballero was the successor to the GMC Sprint, which shared its body with the fourth-generation El Camino. Upon the introduction of the Malibu-based fifth generation of this platform in 1977, GMC changed the name to the more polished-sounding Caballero. This was in keeping with GMC's market strategy of selling more upscale versions of the trucks it shared with Chevy. "Caballero" certainly sounds much more like a vehicle whose keys you'd hand to the valet at the country club than "Sprint."

Caballeros were powered by a range of V6 and V8 engines over the model's surprisingly long run. By 1987, its last year in production, it offered a fuel-injected V6 or a four-barrel, 5.0-liter V8 producing 150 horsepower and a decent 240 pound feet of torque. While the Caballero could haul 1,250 pounds in a bed roughly the same size as contemporary compact pickups, the bed rails were 2 inches lower than those of a S-15 compact truck. This is an example of the kind of compromise that made the Caballero a less-than-ideal pickup. However, it was likely the muddled marketing that really led GMC to sell only a few thousand Caballeros per year.

Seeing this little truck on a list of poor-selling pickups might surprise some, as the LUV seemed to be everywhere in the 1970s. However, sales of the second-generation LUV, introduced in 1981, plummeted over the next two years. But first, let's go back to the beginning. The early 1970s saw the rising popularity of small, imported pickups from manufacturers like Toyota and Nissan (then called Datsun), and American carmakers were eager to get into that market. Since Chevy didn't have a platform ready to adapt into a small truck, it adopted the strategy of "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em." It partnered with Isuzu to introduce a version of Isuzu's Faster that Chevy called the Light Utility Vehicle, or LUV.

The original generation of the LUV sold quite well between 1972 and 1980, with sales peaking at a hair over 100,000 in 1979, a very respectable number for a compact pickup in that era. So why is the LUV on this list? Well, after 1979, it all went wrong. Sales began to slide with the last year of the first-generation LUV in 1980. However, after the introduction of a less appealing redesign in the following year, they went into freefall. The 1981 model sold about 61,000 units and only 22,000 LUVs in 1982. 

What happened? Chevy debuted its home-grown S-10 compact pickup during the 1981 calendar year, attracting many truck buyers away from the outdated LUV. Isuzu also introduced its own version of the LUV to the US market, dubbing it the P'up. The LUV lost its market and its mission, and Chevy quietly canceled it after the 1982 model year. Today it's a classic mini-truck that we wish Chevy would bring back.

The Dodge Rampage and its Plymouth twin, the Scamp, were built to capture some of the car-based truck crowd that bought Chevy El Caminos and Ford Rancheros. Yet the Dodge never rampaged through the sales charts during its brief three-year run, topping out at 17,636 units sold in its first year before settling back down to an average of roughly 10,000 sales in its final two years. The Plymouth Scamp only joined the Rampage for a single year of production in 1983. This duo of unibody trucklets faded into history as part of the fad for car-based trucks that peaked in the early to mid-1980s.

The Rampage was among the smaller examples of its genre, being longer than a Subaru BRAT but a full foot and a half shorter than an El Camino and weighing only 2,300 pounds. It shared Chrysler's L platform with compact cars like the Dodge Omni. Power came from an uninspiring 2.2-liter, non-fuel-injected, inline four-cylinder engine that produced between 84 and 99 horsepower, depending on the model year. Fast forward to today, and unlike similar trucks like the Subaru BRAT that are worth a mint to collectors, the Rampage's value today is only about $4,375 for a good-condition 1984 model. 

The idea of taking one of your most popular models and building a convertible version has been a sound product strategy for almost as long as there have been automobiles — unless the vehicle in question is a pickup truck. It might be possible to count non-aftermarket pickup models on one hand. Dodge tried to buck conventional wisdom with the now-rare Dakota Sport convertible, but it never caught on with buyers, leading to an abbreviated three-year run. On paper, the regular-roofed Dakota pickup truck that Dodge introduced in 1987 had all the ingredients to be a winner, but it never quite found its footing against rivals like the Chevy S-10 and the Ford Ranger. So Dodge decided to do something completely different, chopping the roof off and replacing it with a convertible soft top.

Did it work? Well, it certainly turned heads and arguably paved the way for future convertible truck models like the 2003-2006 Chevy SSR convertible truck and the 2020-onward Jeep Gladiator. Car enthusiasts can applaud Dodge's boldness in creating one of history's most unique vehicles. Dodge partnered with the well-known American Sunroof Corporation (ASC) to create this unusual beast. Power came from a 125-horsepower, 3.9-liter V6 with a choice of manual or automatic transmission. Four-wheel drive was optional. Sales totaled 2,842 in 1989, 909 in 1990, and a whopping total of eight in 1991 before production was discontinued.

If the Dakota Sport convertible is rarer than hen's teeth, the odd-looking SkyRanger is one of the rarest trucks ever made. Apparently, someone at Ford looked at the Dakota Sport and thought, "We need a convertible pickup truck, too." While the SkyRanger technically never went into production, enough of them were built and found their way into private hands that they occasionally pop up at car shows and in sale listings. If you're lucky enough to find one for sale, expect to pay between $10,000 and $25,000.

The SkyRanger appears to have been built for Ford by a now-defunct outfit called Autocrafters. It's a shame this company is no longer around because the SkyRanger isn't all that bad of a build. The convertible top drops completely down into the space behind the seats in the extra-cab Ranger that it's based on. Instead of an awkward roll bar, it has a nifty body-colored buttress called a "targa surround" that slopes down into a sort of rail that runs along the upper edge of the bed and terminates in a spoiler. A GTS version featured body-colored aero add-ons along the lower part of the truck, but the base Elite model without the add-ons is arguably a cleaner and more attractive design.