Look, let’s just come right out and say it: Trucks are awesome. Whether your tastes in automobiles lie with pickups or not, there’s no denying the simple, visceral coolness of a truck. It’s elemental—built into our American nature, along with a love for cold beer, good friends, and country songs about pickup trucks, cold beer, and good friends. We buy them by the millions, use them for both work and play, and make them into critical players in our increasingly-busy lives.
So it should be no surprise that the automotive aftermarket world embraces trucks every bit as fervently as American consumers do. And one glance around the exhibits on the floor of the Specialty Equipment Market Association show in Las Vegas—commonly known simply as SEMA—is all it takes to see the wild variety of customization options for truck buyers today. There are hundreds of booths crammed with products designed to personalize the rigs of America, to make them better suited to any individual’s needs and wants. But nobody wants to just look at a sample of bedliner sitting on a table. So to sex things up, the companies bring flashy, crazy pickups modified to the edge of usability—or, in some cases, well beyond it. Some are old, some are new; some are designed to crawl around off the beaten path, while others are made to cruise along the boulevards on warm summer nights.
So because we want you to be able to glimpse some of the madness and mayhem of the modern custom truck world, we at The Drive wandered the halls and lots of SEMAin order to find as many of the wildest, weirdest, and coolest trucks as we could. Then, because we didn’t want to overload your brains with all the rigs we found, we winnowed it down to this 16 particularly notable examples.
You’re welcome, America.