You’ve seen them: the new passenger vehicles with pickup truck beds sprouting from their behinds. The Subaru Baja, the Chevrolet Avalanche, the Cadillac Escalade EXT. An automotive slice of the 70s slid into this century, along with the bell-bottoms and halter-tops. Avacado-colored refrigerators can’t be far off. But can any of these freshly minted sleds accept the mantle of the defunct, classic, koan-like El Camino?
Actually, the laughable-yet-venerable Chevrolet El Camino was itself a knockoff. Ford was first with the Ranchero, a short, boxy coupe in the front with a pickup bed on the back, launched in the 1957 model year. With the cat-like agility for which Detroit was then known, General Motors had a copy in showrooms by 1959. Ranchero production ended in 1979 around a half-million cars (or are they trucks?), but El Camino the imitator kept going for nearly a decade more, delivering more than a million vehicles to customers bewitched by the car/truck enigma.
Now, more than 15 years after the last El Camino rolled off the line, General Motors has treated the public to the spectacle of the Cadillac Escalade EXT waddling down the street, wagging its stubby little tail of a pickup bed. I called General Motors to see if they could tell me how this self-inflicted caricature of a truck came to pass. But first, I wanted to find out if there was any truth to the rumor that Chevy was bringing back the real El Camino.
“To be honest with you, I’ve not heard anything like that,” said GM spokesman Tom Beaman from the bucket seat of his Pontiac, Michigan, office. “I’ve not heard that rumor.”
In the interest of full disclosure, readers should know that I started this rumor myself. But what’s going on with all these SUVs with truck boxes stuck on the end, I asked Beaman? It turned out to be about mulch. “We call it the ‘family tree,’” he explained, “and it all springs from the basic full-sized truck architecture.” He went on to elaborate about the many lifestyles that can be accommodated by mating different configurations with one basic truck frame. “You want to be able to take five people across the country on a family vacation, but when you get back you want to be able to get mulch and peat moss and stuff like that in the back. An Escalade buyer often times, honestly, they may not put anything in the back. But it’s good to know that it’s there if they want to use it.
Subaru spokesman Rob Moran was much more definite about who’s supposed to be driving their little mutant Baja. “What’s different about our customers is that they are more inclined to outdoor activities. Things like mountain biking, kayaking, outdoor sports, climbing, that kind of thing.” In other words, GenXers are supposed to be walking out of Mountain Dew commercials in droves to shell out more than $20K for this little buggy. Might it also be the spiritual heir of the El Camino, I asked?
“I don’t think so.” Moran pointed out the four seats and some distant Subaru ancestry in the Brat, a truckish little unibody that Subaru smuggled under the chicken tax into the American market in the 70s.
But the lower, cuter, car-like profile of the Baja left a persistent afterimage in my head of the original ugly ducklings of those bygone days. I found a guy with a lovingly restored 1972 Ford Ranchero. Joe Anton, an amiable General Mills machinist, kindly agreed to drive with me to a Subaru lot and park it next to a Baja to see if they would resonate on the same frequency. Side by side, they looked like an unlikely pair. But whatever hooked this guy on the Ranchero was, in some form, present in the Baja. “This thing is so cute,” he said to Morrie’s Subaru General Manager Charlie Rassouli, who had generously provided the Baja for this experiment. “When I see one of these, the first thing I think, is ‘I want one!’” This, of course, makes perfect ad copy and could not have been planned better. Joe did not, however, offer his coveted Ranchero for trade.
I asked Charlie who is actually buying the Baja from him. Is it a Gen-X car for extreme sportster dudes? “I would say the demographic right now is older than that. We’re finding a lot of part-time gardeners and things like that,” said Charlie. Mulch again.—Joe Pastoor
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