Toyota mulls a compact pickup. But there's a catch ...

PLANO, Texas — Those watching closely have noticed that the white-hot Ford Maverick and Hyundai Santa Cruz compact pickups have already racked up nearly 50,000 sales in 2022 through May — an impressive pace in a down U.S. market from what had been an abandoned segment.

But guess who else is eyeballing those results and wondering whether it's time to rekindle its own compact pickup legacy?

The answer is Toyota, but an antithetical bit of emissions regulations might actually make it harder for the Japanese automaker to leap back into the compact pickup segment it once dominated.

"There is space" in the Toyota lineup for a pickup beneath the current midsize Tacoma, said Jack Hollis, senior vice president of automotive operations at Toyota Motor North America. "The question is, how to fill it?"

Hollis — who himself introduced the Toyota A-BAT concept compact unibody pickup at the 2008 Detroit auto show — told Automotive News last week at Toyota Motor North America headquarters here that the Japanese automaker has "continued to look" at the small-truck segment that Ford and Hyundai now occupy, "and we've continued to look for a long time." He said the redesigned Tacoma, due in dealerships next year, is not going to get larger, even as it follows the Tundra full-size pickup and Sequoia large SUV onto Toyota's new global F1 body-on-frame platform.

The Tacoma has filled the "small" pickup space in Toyota's lineup since it debuted in 1995. But over that period, like full-size and midsize pickups from other automakers, the Tacoma has grown considerably. At 212.3 inches in length, the shortest 2022 Tacoma is nearly 34 inches longer than the longest 2000 Tacoma. The current generation is also 9.2 inches taller than the earlier iteration. In fact, the 2000 Tacoma was classified as a compact pickup, while the current version is now the undisputed market share king of midsizers.

"Tacoma has been amazingly successful," said Cooper Ericksen, group vice president for product planning and strategy at Toyota Motor North America. But "we've reached a point where we can't get bigger, frankly, because of 'garageability' — the ability to fit it in the garage, and that's a huge selling point."

Ericksen said his team is "actively looking into" trucks smaller than the Tacoma for Toyota's lineup, where a new unibody pickup, perhaps based on the new Corolla Cross subcompact crossover, might compete directly with the Maverick and Santa Cruz.

"It's undeniable that those products have a place in the market. And how big is that segment going to get? I don't know, but it's something that we need to be looking at and figuring out if it's an area we should play in," Ericksen said.

While it would be easy to think that emissions regulations would favor smaller, lighter, more fuel-efficient pickups over larger, thirstier ones, that's not entirely correct.

As David Cooke, senior vehicles analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, explains, corporate average fuel economy, or CAFE, and greenhouse gas regulations have actually incentivized automakers to grow their pickups in recent decades.

That's because the current standard, which dates to the early 2000s and was driven by NHTSA's desire for added safety, has been based on a vehicle's "footprint," or the area defined by the four points where the tires touch the ground. The greater the area of a vehicle's footprint, the lower the fuel economy standard for that vehicle.

"No matter how you design a standard, manufacturers are going to game it," Cooke told Automotive News via email. "The result of this has been a general trend in increased footprint, though much worse is the way in which manufacturers have gamed the car/truck definition for SUVs to make sure their utility vehicles qualify as trucks to the maximum extent possible" and pushed all-wheel-drive systems for further benefits.

For Toyota to jump back into compact pickups, it would need its entry in the segment to be a net generator of CAFE and greenhouse gas credits. That's in part because the automaker's body-on-frame lineup is only halfway through its first redesign in 14 years, with the Tundra going on sale late last year and the Sequoia set to appear in dealerships this summer, leaving its volume leader, the Tacoma, on the sidelines until 2023 and the 4Runner SUV on deck in 2024. Those long-in-the-tooth designs have weighed on Toyota's CAFE averages as time passed and regulations tightened.

Ericksen said the incentive for automakers to boost the footprint of their light trucks is "kind of a strange situation. It's not the best thing for the environment, but it's the best thing if your company happens to sell really big trucks." Still, he said for Toyota to jump back into compact pickups, any entry would have to be bigger than the small Toyota pickups from the 1980s or '90s — including his own 1982 Toyota 4x4, with its very thin doors and single-row cabin so small he regularly hits his head.

"That's probably not what we need. We probably need something a little more spacious on the inside, more of an SUV-with-a-bed concept, so it's really dialing in," Ericksen said. "And the more that Ford sells, frankly, the more that Hyundai sells, the more we'll be able to get good research on who these customers are, why they want this vehicle, and we'll see if that's the space that we want to enter into."