Let’s check off the bonafides of today’s Toyota truck, shall we? It’s a 4X4, it rocks the turbo 22RE and a five speed stick. Lastly, its a rare and funky Custom Cab, making it one long truck. Let’s see if its price has you longing for it to be cheaper.

Bigg-ass wagons with big-ass engines are what once made suburbia’s ceaseless sprawl manageable. Today we have texting and everything from the Internet so few even need to leave the house. But it wasn’t always so!

Nowadays, the large-form station wagon is pretty much a defunct category, and last Friday we had an example from an also defunct brand. That rocked a 400-CID engine and a tailgate that swung both ways, two factors you just don’t see any more. That was good enough to make its fifty-five hundred dollar price seem palatable, and it ended the day with a solid 65% Nice Price win.

Wagons have for the most part been supplanted by trucks, at least here in the macho land we call America. Truck-based SUVs and their poseur cousins the Crossovers have made wagons an increasingly rare sight on the road, as people like riding tall in the saddle. They are however, indifferent to standing tall before the man.

Do you know what’s an even more rare sight these days than a big wagon? That’s right, Custom Cab pickups, because those fell out of favor once car makers started building the Crew Cabs and four-door trucks we know and love today.

Well, take a look at this crazy funky and tell me if it doesn’t fill you full of want and desire. Of course it may actually fill you with confusion and rage seeing as you likely have never even known that these things were, for a short time, a thing.

A slight bit of history: back in the ‘70s things like crew cabs or four-door mini trucks didn’t exist here in the States. A niche market for such small trucks with bigger seat count was seen and the aftermarket industry—which abhors both a vacuum and mono-tone paint—came to that niche’s rescue. The resulting were built from the late ‘70s into the mid-‘80s and had the turning radius of a small nation, maybe Liechtenstein.

Construction was similar to that of a limo, in which the frame is cut and stretched, along with the driveshaft, exhaust, fuel lines etc, and then capped with an extended body. In the case of the Custom Cab, it was a fiberglass cap, fitted between the bed and standard cab which has had its rear wall unceremoniously sliced off. This results in a cab with two rows of seats and no loss of bed capacity. There were a number of companies performing the conversions, including, as you might expect, Winnebago.

Of course getting into the back seats on any one of these remained quite the challenge as the doors were not extended, nor were additional portals provided in the fiberglass cap.

This truck sports that accessibility challenged back seat, along with some cool beige over root beer ‘80s paint. You get custom bumpers front and rear and chrome factory steelies underneath. Everything looks to be in fine shape, although you might want to ditch the RAIDERS sticker on the bull bar up front if you’re not a member of the Raider Nation.

The interior is equally sweet, at least the areas the seller has decided to focus on in his pictures. The front seat is a bucket-backed bench while the rear gets a full-width seat with armrests.

You’ll note the boost gauge on the A-pillar. That’s because the truck sports a turbo on its 22RE. This was the first year Toyota offered a factory turbo on their truck, a mod that boosted horsepower to 135, making it the most powerful mini-truck available at the time.

There are no under-hood shots (shame! CLANG) so we can’t tell if this one is factory or some mickey-mouse aftermarket deal, but I’m assuming it’s the factory job, which debuted in ‘86. What we can tell is that the truck has a five speed stick and 4WD. It also has only 104,000 miles on the clock, which might be a partial explanation for its overall excellent condition.

The price here is $9,000, which will buy you any number of nice ‘80s Toyota pickups, which as we all know are the best pickups. The thing of it is however, how many Custom Cabs do you think you will see, especially in such nice condition?

What’s your take on this truck and its $9,000 price? Does that seem like deal to do a Custom Cab? Or, is that too much to play the long game?

You decide!

San Francisco Bay Area or go if the ad disappears.

H/T to Chaos-Cascade for the hookup!

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