1997 Dodge Dakota SLT

Ever swing a hammer that was too heavy for you? Or ever try to drive a large nail with a hammer that was just too light? Doing a job with exactly the right-size tool is an entirely different experience. The project becomes a pleasure. The work can even feel like fun. The new Dodge Dakota is like that.

Light pickups can be way-handy transport-when they're properly sized. That's a fact an increasing number of buyers are discovering. Driving a truck that's too big or too small for your real-life, long-term duty cycle, however, can make the experience not only uncomfortable, but expensive. Small trucks pant when they're asked to do too much, and big ones are awkward parking-lot elephants that use too much pricey dead-dinosaur juice.

We drove several versions of the all-new '97 Dakota compact and hammered a V-8-powered, standard-cab prototype through our battery of performance tests. What we found was a real truck with a near-perfect heft for both the daily grind and weekend workouts.

Dodge concentrated its $500-million, 30-month pickup redesign program on five key areas: exterior and interior styling, interior noise reduction, ride and handling, powertrain performance, and safety. At the same time, the engineers wanted to maintain the Dakota's roominess edge over the compact-pickup herd, which includes the Ford Ranger, Chevrolet S10/GMC Sonoma, Toyota Tacoma, and Nissan pickups.

Dodge has targeted the Dakota at the center of the growing "personal use" pickup segment. That's a lucrative market slice bracketed in price and size by ever-slicker, increasingly carlike pickup products such as the new-in-'94 Chevy S-Series on the lower end and the short-bed '97 Ford F-150 on the upper. Here's the first detailed look at this new contender, headed for Dodge showrooms in late fall.

It's been a full decade since the boxy Dakota was introduced, but its simple lines have held up well. In fact, sales have stayed surprisingly strong. In calendar-year 1995, the Dakota sold nearly 112,000 units. Nonetheless, the top-of-the-segment Ford Ranger sold 309,000. So, perhaps it was time for a new look.

If you get a kick from the bad-boy styling of the full-size Dodge Ram pickup, you're going to like the resculptured Dakota. But there's more here than just a smaller Ram. Look carefully and you can see that the Dodge studio has put lots more curves and character lines in the Dakota's sheetmetal. Like some sporty-looking coupes, the new truck even has a waist. In addition, the bulging wheelwells have been flared to accommodate huge, off-road tires like the 31x10.5R15 Wranglers included in the four-wheel-drive tire and handling package.

Interior comfort and good looks also are important to the personal-use buyer, so Dodge attempted to integrate the truck's interior design with the exterior by locating the interior and exterior design studios close to each other. It seems to have worked; the interior shapes share similar radius and surface characteristics with the exterior. For example, the instrument panel echoes the curves of the truck's grille.

Although they went for the styling stretch, Dodge designers kept their ergonomic feet on the ground. This logical, straightforward approach to control location and design is evident in the simple push-pull headlight switch in the traditional position to the left of the column. In the workaday truck world, there's no use reinventing the wheel. The glovebox is big (4.5 liters) and easy to access. Designers also used a computer to help position vital controls within comfortable reach distances, even for smaller drivers. For example, the climate-control switchgear consists of three big, dodo-proof rotary knobs located to the immediate right of the instrument cluster.