This year we kept it simple. No mega cross-country trips and extravagant expenses to report to you, which makes the bean counters happy. Nope, this year we took a meat-and-potatoes approach to picking the Truck and SUV of the Year. We gathered our flock of candidates, rode them to and from work, and took care of personal and business errands with them. We also made a 300-mile round-trip trek to Auto Club Famoso Raceway in Bakersfield, California, to take the vehicles down the 1/4-mile with and without a trailer that weighed in the neighborhood of 3,000 pounds, and put them on the 2WD dyno at Westech in Mira Loma, California, or the AWD dyno at K&N Engineering in Riverside, California.

Another thing that was different this year was our selection of vehicles. Normally, we narrow the field of candidates to those trucks and SUVs that are either debuting or are significantly redesigned for the model year. Last year, we broke away from that rule because GM was the only company with new or redesigned trucks, so we allowed a few other brands to participate to make a more interesting story. Luckily, the field of SUVs was new or redesigned enough to allow us to stick with the usual requirements. This year, however, the only new truck was the redesigned Toyota Tundra, and there really wasn’t anything going on in the mid- or fullsized-SUV side that we counted as new or redesigned. So, we were faced with the option of ditching the story entirely and having a kicked-back fall, or getting loose with the rules again.

We chose the latter, because it gave us an opportunity to see how most of the major players in the 1/2-ton market stack up against each other now that most of them have been significantly revamped in the last few years. As for the SUVs, well, we thought we would go with vehicles that we simply haven’t talked about much before.

You will notice some obvious omissions. Chevrolet and GMC truck did not have a new pickup truck available in its press fleet for us to use for the test (please send all hate mail to GM), and Honda could not meet the long-term requirements for our story. That left us with the following vehicles:

In the truck corner, we had an ‘08 Ford F-150 Lariat Limited, an ‘08 Dodge Ram, an ‘08 Nissan Titan, and an ‘07 Toyota Tundra (’08s were not available yet). For SUVs, we had an ‘08 Dodge Durango, ‘08 Jeep Grand Cherokee with a diesel engine, and an ‘08 Nissan Armada. Read on for our thoughts about these vehicles.