2006 Toyota Tacoma - Dirt Bike Hauler: The Official Truck

Toyota's 236-horsepower, 4.0L DOHC V-6 engine was sporty and powerful. However, I was honestly expecting a little more from a truck with so much cargo capacity. Accelerating on freeway entrances and out of parking lots, the truck isn't hesitant, just sort of relaxed and boring. And while cruising, as I did for days, the motor becomes taxed on hills and the five-speed automatic transmission downshifts often to keep up with the cruise control. Fuel economy was just OK. I ran over 240 gallons through the truck and never hit the 22-mpg highway mark as promised on the sticker. My fuel consumption average was 17.09 mpg with 90 percent highway use. The fuel efficiency dropped most when driving head-on through hurricane-force winds across Wyoming and when I decided to pump in some 85-octane fuel when the lower price couldn't be resisted. The truck's range is great, though, with the fuel light coming on at around 360 miles. I managed to stretch it to 375 miles on one tank, but I wouldn't advise it as I'm sure I was running on fumes.

Toyota offers the Double Cab Tacoma in two bed configurations. Ours had the longer of the two, with more than 6 feet of bed length. This made for a great bike-hauling platform and kept the rear tires off the tailgate for the most part. We've seen some tailgate denting and tweaking issues on the shorter bed-equipped Tacomas from loaded bikes' rear tires slamming on the tailgate over bumps. We're glad our truck had a long bed, and any motocrosser should take this into consideration when buying compact trucks. Two bikes, riding gear, chairs, a box of parts and all my other goodies easily fit in the confines of the bed. The cargo area itself is completely composite, meaning the bed isn't made out of steel at all and will never rust. It also has a nonskid coating that, while better than plain steel beds of the past, isn't nearly as grippy as an aftermarket spray-on coating and could be a bit thicker. Tiedown options are sort of weak for the bike-hauling crowd. The perimeter rail system utilizes movable tiedown points that will hold a bike securely under tension but bend unnervingly with the load. Two bikes is plain scary, as the D-shaped anchors look like they're going to peel right out of the bed. A friendly Tacoma owner I was chatting with suggested we take the standard, bed-mounted floor D-rings in the back of the bed and move them into the front and fasten them with the existing bed-mounting bolts. It looked to work perfectly, but since this truck was only on loan to us, we resisted breaking out the tools. Other cool things in the bed are a couple of secret storage bins that hold a quart of oil or a fanny tool pack perfectly and a 120-volt electrical plug that's hard-wired into the truck and powered through an internal inverter. It powered my laptop while we did some bike radar tests and proved very useful.

The outside appearance of the truck is quite nice to us motorheads. With a great stance and off-road attitude, the vehicle looks as hard-core as any compact truck out there. I was bummed, however, when I discovered that the hood scoop was a dummy and not, in fact, connected to some sort of air-induction super-charger.

I'm a compact truck driver, and I've owned and driven my fair share of full-size, four-wheel-drive behemoths as well. The new breed of Tacomas offer a good balance between the two. You get a roomy, comfortable and family-friendly interior with the added benefit of fitting in the garage door and those tight parking lot spaces. After my adventure with the little truck from Toyota, I was sad to see it go. But I shouldn't really worry. I'll run into plenty of these trucks around the pits of American motocross and supercross and arenacross and...