I find that question interesting as well. Here's how I see it. There were no
trucks between "light duty" and "medium duty" for nearly 100 years. At one
time, medium duty trucks were pretty small, and I guess it wasn't all that
strange. In other words, in 1940, when a 1.5 ton truck could carry only
(duh) 1.5 tons. Only 3000 pounds - too small to haul a car, and not much of
a dump truck either. These old trucks were small and low. There was no need
for a product between 1 ton and 1.5 tons.
Medium duty truck engineering was separate from pickups and they evolved in
different ways. Pickups really grew in the 50's (starting in 47), but medium
duty trucks grew much more and the size difference between them really shot
up. It left an obvious void. This persisted for a long time, like 30 years.
Ford inserted a product in the void first, calling it the F-superduty in the
late 80's. It looked to me like an F-700 low-rider on 16 inch wheels. I
wonder what took them so long; the result was Ford enjoys a monopoly on
small tow trucks and rollbacks, small emergency vehicles, and lots of other
commercial vehicles in that size range. It's interesting to point out that
people used to have C30's in all these jobs but they were always too small.
Folks just had to live with it. On the highway, it looks like GM blew a big
lead in "1-ton" trucks but I don't know what the stats would say. Dodge, of
course, stopped making them entirely in 1980 so those statistics are pretty
easy!
Obviously GM and Dodge have thought about this market, so my opinion is they
don't think it's worth the money to go after it, even though it's clearly a
big market. If GM and Dodge want to take a shot at it, they have to develop
products AND they'd only get part of the market AND competition would drive
prices down. It's not worth nearly as much to go in as the second player.
Eventually GM will do it, because they have unlimited resources, and they'll
justify it by saying it's good for sales of other (higher volume) trucks.
It's a highly visible market. Dodge will not because they have no
pretentions of building large trucks anyway.
Post by pdbSeems to me that Ford-Chevy-Dodge all compete in the Ranger, F150, F250,
F350 marketplace. But Ford has the F450, F550 and neither Dodge nor Chevy
seems to have a competitive mdoel.
Am I missing something?