Photos of Our Battle Between the Ford Ranger vs. Jeep Gladiator, Chevy Colorado, and Honda Ridgeline
We hook up the trailer, head out on the highway, and hit the mud in four of the hottest littlish trucks on the market.
The pickup is as central to the American Dream as the white picket fence. It's not just the house and the 2.5 kids that we want, it's all the projects around that house, the Home Depot runs, the toys we can hitch up, and somewhere to play with them. And just because we're in a new era of global awareness and responsibility doesn't mean that dream has to die.
But it could be downsized to a more sustainable scale. Luckily, American truckmakers have you covered. Some people call them mid-size pickups; others point out that a middle implies a point between two extremes and therefore refer to these obviously-not-small things as compact trucks. Whatever you call them, after flirting with stagnation in the early part of the decade, the less-than-full-size-pickup market is booming again.
To read the full comparison, click here: 2019 Ford Ranger vs. 2020 Jeep Gladiator vs. 2019 Chevrolet Colorado vs. 2019 Honda Ridgeline
The most exciting thing to happen to this segment since NAPA started putting those hilariously lifelike giant hats on the Rangers in its delivery fleet is the Jeep Gladiator. It's kind of a Wrangler with a bed, except that it's way more than that. Jeep reengineered the entire back half of the frame so thoroughly that maximum payload jumps from 1000 pounds in the Wrangler to 1600 in certain truck trims.
At 7650 pounds when optioned properly, the Gladiator's towing capacity not only exceeds the four-door Wrangler's by 4150 pounds and leads this class, but it approaches the ratings of the all-growed-up big trucks. With a starting price of $41,890 and an as-tested total of $55,485, our Overland model also rivals the big trucks in price.
Since sometimes these trucks are tools and sometimes they're toys, we expanded our usual testing regimen to get a fuller impression of their capabilities. We hooked each up to a small aluminum trailer with a Honda Pioneer side-by-side on it, a load of about 3500 pounds. Then we hit the highway, charting a course for Hollister Hills State Vehicular Recreational Area, an off-road park just outside of Hollister, California, where we got rained on, good and muddy, and only almost stuck.
The days get long on comparison tests. Sometimes our attention wanes. Following a photo stop outside Buttonwillow, California, everybody was staring at their phones when photographer Marc Urbano pulled onto the road. When he radioed to ask if we were going to follow him, we scrambled our trucks and took off. In the wrong direction. For 15 minutes. With spotty cell coverage, it took that long for Urbano to get hold of one of us and tell us to turn around.
But when we whipped those 180s in the mountains, nobody was enjoying the canyon-road run as much as the guy in the Colorado. The Chevy's control feel and responses are the most sports-car-like in the class. Ride motions are clipped but perfectly damped.
The brake pedal is Corvette firm, with natural modulation, and generated the shortest stop in the test. Even the Colorado's driving position is reminiscent of a car's, with the seat low to the floor and sheetmetal that cradles occupants without smothering them or ruining sightlines. Technical director Eric Tingwall called it "the best-driving body-on-frame vehicle on sale today."
We were less impressed with the Chevy's powertrain. The 3.6-liter thrashes around through much of the rev range, with nothing more than a gritty roar making it out of the engine room until the last couple hundred rpm before the fuel cutoff, when the sound resolves into something kind of stirring. And the transmission isn't much more couth, with unpredictable gear spacing and an overly aggressive upshift schedule that frequently had the revs lower than we wanted.
But the Colorado is a well-balanced package for tool and toy duties. In spite of having the test's second-lowest ground clearance, the Chevy acquitted itself well off-road. Somebody might have snagged the lower air dam on a mound and ripped it off, but we all agreed that this at-speed modification represented an improvement to the way the Colorado looks, and that even though there's a ZR2 above the Z71 in the off-road hierarchy, an off-road special really shouldn't have a vulnerable piece of black plastic hanging down beneath its chin.
With the trailer hooked up, the Colorado's ride quality was barely changed. It still rode better than the Ford and Jeep. An outstanding toy and an effective tool, the Colorado wins because it excels no matter the task.
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