The Ford Raptor has pretty much owned the off-road oriented truck market since it was introduced a few years ago. That might change on February 6th, when Toyota drops their TRD Pro Series Tundra and 4Runner at the Chicago auto show.

Only a few detail images have been posted to Toyota's Facebook page, with just badges to help us guess what kind of capability they might have. But with captions like "conquer the great outdoors" and "this is gonna be an epic ride," I'm starting to get my hopes way the hell up that these things are going to be serious entrants in the sparely populated factory-ready rough n' tumble off-road genre.

Yeah, you can put together a pretty wild Ram without going further than the Mopar catalogue, Nissan's Pro4-X trucks aren't awful and of course Toyota's had TRD pickups for ages. But the Ram Runner is largely unknown, and the Japanese trucks were never meant to approach the extremeness of a real high-performance off-roader like the Raptor.

The new Toyotas have black badges, black wheels, and the Tundra's got a 5.7 V8. We'll know more when the curtain comes up on February 6. I'm going to Chicago tomorrow to camp out and try and learn everything I can about these bad boys, so stay tuned.