Ford offered a pretty reasonable excuse in the past for why they cancelled the Ranger.
Economy of scale means that if they just make a whole bunch of one type of truck, they can reduce costs, and the American consumer traditionally would pay more for a larger truck than a smaller one.
So if you have two trucks that are otherwise identical (same gauge cluster and seats and powertrain), but one truck is say 25% bigger than the other, Americans wouldn't pay the same amount for the smaller truck and mentally calculate that smaller equals less and if you get less you should pay less.
Problem is, making a smaller truck doesn't really cost that much less, as crash safety means that often the smaller vehicle still uses a good amount of material just packaged more compactly, and the little bit less material the shrunken down version uses isn't that expensive compared to most of the money that goes into R&D and assembly and marketing and what not.
So a truck 70% the size of an F-150 has to cost about 90% of what the F-150 does, and that calculation wasn't a huge hit with consumers at the time, who would rather just take a base model of the bigger truck if they wanted it 10% cheaper.
I think part of the renewed interest in smaller trucks again has to do with the fact that gas prices have increased approximately 50% from this time last year. So a 15mpg fullsize pickup is looking less attractive to a lot of people. People are a lot like frogs and water temperature fable when it comes to gas prices IMO. If the change is very slow, just like the frog they don't really notice much, but if you change the price or water temp very quickly you get a shock factor and response.
Good summary. The car companies can't make much money on these so they have to do volume. This is why I don't think the base truck is going to change much mechanically in the future. They might put some other off the shelf components like an alternate rear diff but there will probably not be a 2 door version. Too much re tooling. The only thing I see them doing is an EV version since there is space to squeeze in another battery. The tech already exists on the other Fords sharing the platform IIRC. And honestly I think they will do that more to satisfy government mandates than due to market pressure.
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