I hate to start anything with a "Back in my day!" type sentiment, but do you realize how freakin' expensive pickup trucks have become? I mean, we were just talking about how you could get a Toyota Tacoma into the $70,000 range on Slack and asking, "How have we come to this?!"
Across the spectrum, pickups have skyrocketed in price, both due to corporate greed and inflation, which really go hand in hand. But that leaves truck customers with both staring down the barrel of a $1,000+ a month car payment, as well as a truck worth so much, you don't even want to use it for truck things. You think you're going to throw gear or motorcycles or ATVs into the bed, or maybe take it out into a pasture to feed cattle, horses, or get out into the backcountry to hunt with something that costs what a family starter home used to cost in the '90s?
Absolutely not.
Folks are going to baby those machines. They're going to keep them pristine. They're going to fear damaging them, both because that'll plummet the truck's value—making them upside down on their loan—as well as cause repair bills that total thousands for something that used to cost a firm handshake and two nickels. I jest, of course, but most modern headlights are sealed units that cost thousands to replace. Do you really want to risk that?
This is where the new four-door Kawasaki Ridge Crew comes into play, as it takes the old-school formula of a pickup truck—four doors, spartan interior you can wash out with a hose, work truck capabilities—and brings the price down to reality. In essence, the new Ridge Crew is a pickup from the late '80s or early '90s, capable, affordable, and has the creature comforts you'd want when the weather goes bad, but you have to still get after it.
Ford F-150 who?
Kawasaki's Ridge Crew is based on a stretched two-door Ridge, the same that our very own Robbie Bacon had so much fun with last year. It's powered by a 999cc four-cylinder engine, and based on which model and trim you get, you'll have access to either 92 horsepower or 116 horsepower. Seating can be had for up to six passengers, and payload remains a whopping 1,000 pounds, with a tow rating of 2,500 pounds.
That's good enough to tow a trailer of Kawasaki dirt bikes, ATVs, or the brand's Jet Skis. Not that any of that was mentioned by Kawasaki at our introduction, but I did the math.
Creature comforts abound within the cabin, too, as you get full HVAC including heat and A/C, the former of which came in handy during our trek into the wilderness of a Montana spring—there were two instances of whiteouts followed by wind and sun. Cameras can be had both at the front and the back, giving the driver almost a 360-degree view around the machine, and you also get niceties like Apple CarPlay, Android Auto, or, if you spec it up, Garmin's Tread infotainment center.
There's also 14 inches of suspension travel and clearance, an assisted bed piston to help drop whatever payload you're hauling, and a coffee table book's worth of accessories so that you can get up to whatever you need all within the confines of the UTV. All while not worrying you're going to bend sheet metal, break a lamp, or get blood on your seats—whether it's animal or your own. And it lived up to everything promised as we toured, and put it to use, Montana's epically beautiful Ranch at Rock Creek resort just outside of Philipsburg.
The Ranch at Rock Creek is a working ranch that encompasses a total of 6,600 acres. In those confines are one of the best trout streams in the West—I caught three during my first ever fly fishing trek with Field & Stream's Sage Marshall—horse pasture, open range, and pine-encrusted wilderness that holds towering meadows, steep cliffs, and all the animals you'd care to chase.
I was especially enamored by the massive elk herd I spotted from high atop one vantage point, but I might have an addiction to chasing these particular critters.
Our romp took us through it all, as well as across trails with deep snow ruts and icy bends, testing the capabilities of both our Ridge Crews, their tires, and our bravery in certain sections. I was pretty impressed by the clearance and ride quality over the bumpy terrain as it transitioned between rocky ruts and mud wallows to snow-shod ruts and slippery ice. And that's with the tire pressures being slightly higher than I'd run them for this particular sort of work—we were at the manufacturer-recommended 30 PSI.
But nothing seemed to phase the UTV, as Kawasaki did an admirable job engineering the package as a whole. As is my belief in the space as a whole, the brand also really aimed to showcase just how much this UTV could be used to replace your truck. Which is why we also threw a handful of hay bales and snow into the bed, we saw it plow a small section of sugary-hard snow high up at elevation, and then backed the machines into a trailer that'd be perfect to tow whatever you needed either into the backcountry or around the farm. We also moved some "fallen" trees in the middle of our path with the Warn winch that comes standard on the XR trim, which it did with ease.
And we did so all while being extremely comfortable inside the cabins.
As I mentioned earlier, a Western state spring is one that involves gray skies in the morning, freezing cold wind in the late morning, sunshine for about twenty seconds, a whiteout blizzard for an hour, sunshine again for 12 minutes, another whiteout, the wind dying down, and finally ending on either a spectacularly beautiful sunset filled with pinks and oranges, or another blizzard. We had all of that and the latter of the two end options. But through it all, I stayed warm inside the Ridge Crew. As would whoever you decide to bring with. It really checks off every box. Or, at the very least, can be built up with certain accessories to check every box.
About my only complaint throughout the day was the Kawasaki's seating height, and that was something I wasn't alone in.
See, Kawasaki erred on the side of giving the Ridge Crew a pretty high seat height. This was to both make ingress and egress more easily handled, as well as allowing those of an average stature a pretty great seat height. But in doing so, anyone that's shorter than average, or taller than average in my particular case, will likely find that the seat height could be improved by making it adjustable. I, personally, would've loved to have seen an adjustment to reduce the overall height by two to three inches, and one of the other folks there who's on the shorter side said she'd like to see it lowered in the same fashion, too, as her feet were somewhat danglin'.
As such, with a helmet on—though I never wear one while driving myself in real life—I was hitting my visor and the top of my helmet against the roof. So an adjustable seat height would go a long way in making it more comfortable. But that's about it in terms of annoyances you should be aware of. But what about pricing? Easy, think 1990s Ford F-150.
Now, when you consider the Kawasaki Ridge Crew is powered by a 999cc inline four-cylinder engine and only puts out, at most, 116 horsepower, a starting price of $31,000 might seem pricey. But the whole thing weighs under 2,000 pounds. And because the body panels are plastic, parts are easily replaced and cheap, but the powertrain, suspension, and everything else is made to get beaten on, well, that starting price is absolutely in line with what a couple generations of pickup ago used to cost before every truck maker lost their minds.
Could you imagine the sales if any of the Big Three started offering a $31,000 work truck these days? And no, I don't count the Maverick as a truck. I do count the Ridge Crew as one, though. One that I'm unafraid to beat on, get dirty, and put away wet. A truck that I can actually use for truck things. A truck that won't be a garage queen. An actual truck.
Albeit, a truck that suspiciously looks like a new side-by-side and says "Kawasaki" along its bed.
