Why We Moved Our 2024 MotorTrend Truck of the Year Competition to Detroit

"I hear they know a thing or two about trucks in Detroit," big boss Ed Loh liked to say when explaining why, for the first time in MotorTrend's 75-year history, we conducted one of our signature Of The Year evaluations in the Motor City. His quip should be a reality check for anyone who believes the Detroit manufacturers face imminent extinction. California may represent the technological tip of the spear and cultural capital of the auto industry, but Detroit still understands what huge numbers of Americans really want. Remember, the three most popular vehicles in this country—the Ford F-150, the Chevrolet Silverado 1500, and the Ram 1500—are built by automakers that call Michigan home.

The boss wasn't just talking about the manufacturers, though. Moving Truck of the Year across the country was an opportunity to flex the Michigan testing capabilities we've built for the past 18 months. Last spring, as part of that effort, we hired senior technical editor Matt Chudzinski from Roush, a contract engineering firm that also dabbles in slapping superchargers on Fords. If you own a Roush Mustang built between 2011 and 2012, there's a decent chance Chudzinski bolted the blower to the engine. At Disneyland you can bobsled through a Mickey Mouse version of the Matterhorn in cars he fabricated.

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For our purposes, we were impressed by Chudzinski's time in Roush's durability lab, where he collected a book's worth of stories and insights while working with seemingly every startup carmaker in this country. At this event, his first Truck of the Year program, the rookie earned the MVP nod, running half the contenders through MotorTrend's gauntlet of performance tests at our Michigan proving ground before joining the editors, photographers, and videographers that descended on the Detroit suburbs for a week of judging.

The change of scenery—note the exotic flora like trees and grass in the photos—also gave us reason to rethink a program we had polished to a concours-quality shine after roughly 15 years of holding Truck of the Year in Kingman, Arizona. While towing has always been a staple of TOTY evaluations, this year we made a point to use the kinds of toys that lead so many Americans to buy a truck. Judges pulled Polaris Xpedition side-by-sides, Mastercraft XT23 wakeboarding boats, and a trio of campers borrowed from General RV because it's not only weight that matters when towing, but size, too. The thrill and challenge of hauling a 42-foot fifth-wheel isn't just accelerating, stopping, and steering an extra 15,000 pounds. It's also negotiating traffic when your rig is longer than a semi-trailer. The best trucks make towing effortless with a deep well of torque, unflappable stability, and a host of electronic helpers to watch your six.

Our other big change was to put in more miles off-road. Loh is understandably skeptical anytime a staffer suggests playing with trucks in the sandbox. He'll say something like, "You just want to jump stuff," which of course isn't entirely wrong, but we're hardly the only ones drawn to the dirt. In Michigan, you can't throw a Petoskey stone in a Meijer parking lot without hitting a Tremor, a Trail Boss, a Raptor, and a Rebel.

Research and consulting firm AutoPacific recently surveyed more than 11,700 drivers who plan to buy a new vehicle in the next three years and found a whopping 26 percent want their next vehicle to have an off-road high-performance package with upgrades like a lifted suspension, all-terrain tires, and other equipment for improved capability, even at a hypothetical cost of $4,000. With those buyers in mind MotorTrend's resident off-road dirtbag and technical writer Jered Korfhage designed a circuit at Holly Oaks off-road park. His buffet of frame twisters, boulder piles, loose scrambles, and mud-slicked trails drew out surprises and shortcomings that helped our judges suss out the winner.

By pure coincidence, only the Detroit brands showed up to compete for our inaugural Michigan test. Our October evaluations were too early to get our hands on the new Toyota Tacoma, the Tesla Cybertruck, the Chevy Silverado EV, and the redesigned Ford Ranger.

We'll be back in Detroit with those models and more next year to once again go deep testing the newest trucks in all the different ways owners use them. We drive the contenders unloaded and with thousands of pounds in the bed. We scrutinize how they drive on Michigan's notoriously bad roads and at the test track. We use them to haul toys and muck through the dirt. We climb into beds and poke at touchscreens. Exhaustive testing like this and our year-round surveillance are why we know a thing or two about trucks here at MotorTrend.