Which is why, for 2024, we decided to throw a wrench—or perhaps we should say a mitten—into the works.

For years, we've run TOTY not too far from our Los Angeles headquarters, testing in the deserts of California or Arizona. ButMTalso maintains an office in metro Detroit, and we thought it might make things interesting if we moved TOTY to the Wolverine State.

Fitting, then, that all of this year's entrants are Michiganders. What happened to the imports and out-of-staters? Toyota's intriguing new Tacoma and Mercedes' electric E-Sprinter weren't ready in time for TOTY testing, and Rivian said it didn't have a dual-motor version of the Rivian R1T available. Tesla declined to send the just-now-arriving Cybertruck; hopefully it'll compete next year. We invited the Lordstown Endurance, but the company went bankrupt. A poor excuse not to show up, if you ask us.

That left us with a strong lineup of Detroit iron. General Motors sent over an impressively sized murder of Chevrolet Colorados and GMC Canyons, a pair of heavy-duty Chevrolet Silverado HDs, a GMC Sierra 2500, and a Hummer EV, the only electric truck in this year's competition. Ford entered two of its revised Super Duty trucks as well as the supercharged F-150 Raptor R—the 2023 model, not the updated '24. (The '23 wasn't ready for last year's TOTY, and the same fate befell the new version.) Ford's new Ranger was supposed to appear, but the UAW strike put the kibosh on that. Incidentally, if you visit the TOTY competition, you can tell who schedules the vehicles for our testing—look for the guy with trembling hands and graying hair.

MotorTrend's Michigan contingent isn't large enough to staff TOTY on its own, so we flew some Californians to the Midwest, most of whom couldn't imagine how Detroit could possibly duplicate the dazzling array of roads in the actual West. Our first few days of TOTY testing were based out of the Mt. Brighton ski resort, closed for the season and therefore ours for the duration. The lodge's generous confines provided plenty of room for our photo team to store the truckload of junk food that has become an OTY staple.

Much to the Angelinos' surprise and delight, the roads surrounding Mt. Brighton turned out to be perfect for testing trucks: enough curves and elevation changes, expressways in various states of disrepair, and miles of the pockmarked pavement Michigan is (in)famous for. We even had dirt roads on our test route, causing the Californians to reconsider whether asphalt is really necessary for an orderly and civilized society.

Testing chief Eric Tingwall procured a variety of stuff to tow behind our contenders, including ATVs, boats, and a couple of RVs large enough to merit their own ZIP codes. Tingwall assured us he knew how to operate all this equipment and that the two hours required to retract the jacks on the fifth-wheel mansion was standard operating procedure. He also procured a forklift to move the hundred-pound horse-stall mats we use for payload testing, something that never occurred to the Californians; in previous years, we hauled those suckers by hand.

After two days of on-road driving, we upped sticks and moved camp to Oakland County, home of the magnificent Holly Oaks ORV Park. This 235-acre outdoor odyssey has every sort of off-road obstacle imaginable, both natural and human-made. At the top of an intimidating concrete rise known as Mt. Magna, the Michiganders warned us off a rather large trench they call the Erik Johnson Memorial No-Go Zone. It earned this name after our digital director creatively restyled the front bumper of a Silverado using only the tools he had on hand, specifically the edge of the trench, the weight of the truck, and his excuse that he could see nothing but sky through the windshield.