United States Army Staff Sergeant. Trevor McKinnon decided to buy a new car slowly and then immediately.

Within a few days, he had to call his boyfriend's parents to send a water heater. He read a review about Maverick, a small pickup truck, the latest product of Ford Motor Company.

"I visited cars.com and saw a Maverick for sale in Colorado Springs," he recalled. "I drove over and bought it that day."

The 26-year-old McKinnon does not ski or camp; he does not do business or even drives. But he is the first time he owns a homeowner and is happy to no longer fix the ratchet furniture on the roof of his 2018 Ford Focus. More importantly, his "Cactus Gray" Maverick is equally efficient, consistently recording 28 miles per gallon of gasoline.

After oversize trucks and eliminated many common car-shaped vehicles (including the McKinnon-traded Fox), the US auto industry is playing old games with small pickup trucks. After the natural gas crisis of the 1970s, the same type of oil working rigs that gained power during the Reagan era are reviving today as young buyers worry about the climate crisis and face piles of student debt.

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Jim Baumbick, vice president of product line management at Ford, said the company sees small trucks as "an untapped opportunity"—a valuable so-called blank space in the automotive industry, which is full of SUVs of all shapes and sizes. Baumbick said that Ford has been paying close attention to the entry car market and has seen "many competitors and many customers" but not many trucks. He said: "When you list things you can do on a truck but not on a car, the list becomes very long."

In addition to Ford’s Maverick, Hyundai Motor recently launched the Santa Cruz, which is a simpler equipment that looks like a small sport utility vehicle with a hot tub bolted to the rear. Gil Castillo, senior product strategy manager, said that when developing this machine made in Alabama, modern tacticians did more research in the United States than they did on almost any vehicle. They did not find many disgruntled pickup drivers, but they did find a large group of people driving a compact crossover SUV, and they were eager for more cargo space. They are mountain bikers in San Francisco and Brooklyn, football dads and ski moms in the suburbs, and DIY and HGTV fans across the United States.

"We don't really think of our vehicles as pickup trucks," Castillo explained. "When you look at the size of the compact SUV market... we realize that you don't need so many people interested in a solution like Santa Cruz to get significant sales."

Forecaster LMC Automotive predicts that by the middle of the 20th year, the US compact pickup market will grow to 200,000 vehicles per year. It also expects Toyota to return to the small truck game and possibly General Motors. General Motors declined to comment.

"This is a market segment with legs," said Jeff Shuster, senior vice president of forecasting at LMC. "Millennials are interested in the practicality of pickup trucks and the flexibility of open beds, whether you use it as a lifestyle truck or go to a hardware store."

Chris Cuellar, a computer scientist in Albuquerque, New Mexico, has just purchased a $39,000 blue-gray Maverick called "Area 51 Blue" to add to his family fleet, which also includes a Ford Focus compact car And a Honda Odyssey minivan.

"If you asked me if I owned a truck two years ago, I would tell you you were crazy," Cuellar said. "But as life catches up, you are a homeowner, you start having to do yard work, you need to get Home Depot to run, and you realize that your Ford Focus doesn't cut it anymore." Main selling point: Maverick Can fit all three of his children's car seats.

Matt Meredith's YouTube video about customizing his new Maverick has received 60,000 views in the past two weeks. This focus helps to increase advertising revenue and business for Meredith's company Bullseye Custom Autos. The Air Force veteran spends most of his time adjusting his two F-150s for the track, but Maverick has taken over his daily driving: transporting headlights and other equipment for trade shows and acting as a borrower for customers. Last year, Meredith drove his larger Ford pickup 46,000 miles, so he expected his fuel savings to be significant.

He said: "I have beaten the nonsense that I love forever, and my average fuel consumption is still far more than 23 miles per gallon." "This is very useful."

The maverick engineer traded the cargo capacity of the loft in exchange for the option of parallel parking in a narrow city block—it was nearly three feet shorter than its full-size sibling. They replaced the towing stunt of the jumbo jet with a hybrid engine, which can travel 42 miles per gallon of gasoline. They canceled the F-150's ubiquitous chassis and used it for the one-piece frame of its small Escape SUV, making it smoother on paved roads. The dashboard is a cheap composite material, but Apple CarPlay is standard.

These decisions led the automaker to design a humble car window sticker with a starting price of less than $20,000. "Entry level does not mean cheap. It means affordable," Baumbek said. Maverick is manufactured in Mexico, where the wages of workers are only a small part of the wages of Ford American employees.

At the same time, the modern Santa Cruz is more compact, four inches shorter and nearly three inches narrower. The drilling rig starts at a little less than US$24,000 and is called a "sports adventure vehicle" by suits and shoes in South Korea. Unlike Ford’s boxy structure, it is a set of winding curves, similar to modern SUVs, with a large chunk of the rear cut off.

"We can't just design something that looks like a traditional truck but is smaller," Castillo said. Getting the right look and function is tricky, but Hyundai does have a variety of scripts.

After the natural gas crisis in the 1970s, automakers introduced several small trucks as a set of cheap wheels for first-time buyers. These include the Chevrolet S-10, the Ford Ranger, which is much smaller than the current version, and the North American Toyota pickup (called Hilux in the international market). It is the source of inspiration for the yellow Pizza Planet pickup in the Toy Story movie, and its tailgate has only the letters "YO". The Chevrolet S-10 became the basis of the S-10 Blazer, the first compact SUV in the United States in 1983.

Gasoline prices eventually plummeted, and ever-changing tastes sent compact pickups to the scrap pile, eventually being replaced by larger and more expensive mid-size trucks, including the "Taco", Toyota's best-selling Toyota Tacoma. General Motors launched two mid-size pickup trucks at the end of 2014, Chevrolet Colorado and GMC Sierra. Ford launched the reborn Ranger in 2018-it has been out of the market for seven years. Jeep offered its Wrangler the treatment of a gladiator truck, who attacked the dealership in early 2019.

Introducing smaller and cheaper cars is a daunting task. The risk is that it will attract buyers, otherwise they will buy larger and more profitable machines-what consultants call cannibalization. Crucially, this did not happen when Detroit launched the mid-size truck parade nearly a decade ago. Sales of its half-ton money-making machine continue to grow steadily, indicating that the industry has attracted a whole new group of buyers.

Ford sold 4,140 Mavericks in October, this is its first full month of sales, and it has 100,000 non-binding reservations, roughly the number of F-150s it sold in seven weeks. In August and September, Hyundai Motor sold nearly 3,000 Santa Cruz pickup trucks. The rig is ready to surpass the company's traditional car. Between 2014 and 2019, the sales of medium-duty trucks in the United States soared by 155% to 639,000 units. During the same period, the market for full-size pickup trucks grew by 20%. This is a good product plan. If it is effective from large to medium, maybe it can be from medium to small.

LMC estimates that Ford will sell 50,000 to 60,000 Mavericks each year, and Hyundai may sell 30,000 to 40,000 Santa Cruz. Schuster said that when Toyota enters the market, it will challenge Ford's bragging rights. Schuster said that General Motors is taking a "wait and see" approach, but if the market segment takes off, it is likely to join the competition.

Currently, Maverick and Santa Cruz have their own emerging markets. "When you try to develop something incomplete and incomplete, there is always this kind of risk," Castillo said. "But it seems that the market has understood."