Toyota: Bugger me, Hilux turns 30

Toyota Hilux. Photo / Supplied

Toyota's Hilux became New Zealand's top-selling light truck in 1982 - and has stayed there for 30 years. At times it's been the top-selling vehicle in the country.

More than 86,700 of the ubiquitous one-tonne utes have been sold here since 1976, largely in rural areas, although sales have slowly drifted to the city. Today, 44 per cent are sold in the four main centres.

In the early days Hilux played second fiddle to Mazda's B-Series ute, which eventually lost its sales lead, but went on to reinvent itself several times to become today's glamorous BT-50.

During those 30 years Hilux has been close to losing its top perch only three times, to Mitsubishi at the end of the 1980s, to Nissan's Navara in 1998 and to the Ford Courier in 2000.

Last year Toyota sold 3816 Hiluxes, 1500 more than its closest rival. Overall it makes up almost 30 per cent of total Toyota's New Zealand sales. Worldwide, it sells more than 500,000 a year.

Now in its seventh generation, the Hilux is no longer the sexiest, newest or most feature-rich ute in the paddock and an all-new model won't be along for a couple of years. Toyota, however, seems unconcerned, and is looking to sell about 360 units a month this year.

Toyota reckons the truck will retain its crown because of buyer loyalty, the breadth of its dealer network, its customer-care policy, a wide model range and a reputation for toughness and reliability.

There are stories of Hiluxes topping 500,000km with only regular maintenance. It has also become, reportedly to Toyota's embarrassment, the military transport-assault weapon of choice in Third World and Middle East conflicts. The war between Libya and Chad was named The Toyota War because of the Hiluxes used by Chad as light cavalry vehicles.

Its durability received other publicity money couldn't buy when the Top Gear TV programme tried to "kill" a 1988 diesel - one that had already done 306,000km - by such misuse as submerging, driving down steps, hitting it with a wrecking ball and putting it on top of an apartment building that was about to be brought down by explosives. The truck managed to start after every impact, its twisted remains now permanently displayed at the show's studio.

In 2007, the team raced a modified Hilux to the magnetic north pole, the first vehicle to get there, and three years later drove one to the summit of an erupting Icelandic volcano.

No big deal for Kiwis, though. Years earlier, its extreme though sometimes fanciful, off-road abilities were shown over and over in the nation's living rooms in the famous Barry Crump TV commercials.

Other ads followed the Crumpy series, including the one featuring Hercules the dog that promoted the word "bugger" from a dirty word into mainstream vocabulary.

In 1983 Steve Prangnell, now Toyota's general manager of sales and operations,

started working for Toyota as a mechanic at the Christchurch factory, which was assembling Hiluxes, Coronas and Hiace vans.

"We were doing the Hilux semi-knocked-down in batches of 10, so the cabs were coming in pre-painted and we were doing the chassis, powertrains, and trimming them," he said.

That same year, Hilux production started at Thames, which had just built its 100,000th vehicle: a Corolla. Thames was the last factory to close in the 1998 gutting of the assembly industry, although some staff retained their jobs refurbishing vehicles.

Plans to build Hiluxes there for Australia were killed by tariffs and bureaucracy, despite the early days of CER.

Explosives and Arctic crevasses couldn't oust the Hilux, but it was no problem for bureaucracy.