The Dodge Dakota is unlikely to be a pickup that many truck buyers think about today. It hasn’t been on sale in the United States since 2011, and when it was last on sale, Dodge struggled to sell more than 10,000 copies a year. But if you wind the clock back a decade or so, the Dakota was something special. In the late 1990s, Dodge was doing something that its competition wasn’t: selling a souped-up, street-oriented midsize pickup truck. This is the short-lived Dakota R/T, and it was one of the last true midsize muscle trucks.
The muscle truck has always been a wonderful remix of the muscle car formula. Take a truck, which is normally a slow, utilitarian vehicle, and load it up with the hottest engine you can find. Then drop the suspension, add wide tires, and replace the soft bench with hot bucket seats. Maybe paint it black or some other fast or sinister color. Boom, you now have a muscle truck, and it’s perhaps the ultimate form of the muscle car. Muscle trucks can still haul loads and still do some truck stuff, but then destroy sporty cars when they’re not working. What’s not to love about that?
America’s relationship with street trucks and muscle trucks has always been fascinating because these trucks seem to have come and gone in waves. The 1964 Dodge D-100 Custom Sports Special is often reported to be the very first muscle truck, with its sporty bucket seats, racing stripes, and an optional 365 HP 426 Wedge V8.
Later, Dodge would come swinging for the fences with the Li’l Red Express truck of the 1970s. This truck wasn’t just quick for a truck, but at the time, it made good use of a regulatory loophole to become technically the fastest vehicle in America that a regular person could buy from a dealership.
The muscle truck phenomenon really caught on in the 1990s, when General Motors was happy to sell you a GMC Syclone and a Chevy 454SS while Ford fired off shots with its SVT F-150 Lightning. Even Toyota got in on the madness by offering a supercharger kit for the Toyota Tacoma.
At the same time, America was also going through one of its street truck phases. As the name implies, a street truck is one that’s a little bit less for work and is more for dominating the blacktop. Street trucks aren’t always muscle trucks, but they do often have flashy wheels, lowered suspension, bold paint, and more friendly road manners than a regular truck. A decent modern example would be the Ford Maverick Lobo.
Perhaps the wildest purveyor of street trucks and muscle trucks was Dodge and the many variations of the Dakota. The original Dakota of the late 1980s was able to be had as a Shelby or as a wild convertible. The Dakota even got to be the donor truck for a brief revival of the Li’l Red Express. Dodge also did what its competition didn’t and was willing to sell the Dakota for several years with the meaty V8 engines from its full-size line.
One of these V8s was the short-lived Dakota R/T. Sold from just 1998 to 2003, this pickup was among the last of the true midsize muscle trucks.
A Big Deal
The original Dodge Dakota was something of a huge deal. When it launched in October 1986 for the 1987 model year, the Dakota attempted to be the Goldilocks of trucks.
As Popular Science wrote in May 1986, Dodge wanted its new Dakota to do so much with so little. The marque had realized the boom that compact and midsize trucks were experiencing, and wanted to offer something that nobody else had. The Dakota was more or less supposed to split the difference between what was then the current crop of compact trucks and full-size trucks. The logic was that a lot of buyers wanted the payload and hauling capabilities of a full-size truck, but didn’t care for the harsh ride or the high levels of bulk that came attached to a big truck.
Yet, Dodge felt that the compact trucks of the era weren’t good enough, given their small engines, lower payloads, and beds that were shorter than eight feet. The Dakota would land somewhere in the middle. It was smaller than a full-size truck, but had an eight-foot bed. It would have a payload up to 2,550 pounds and an initial tow rating as high as 5,500 pounds, but ride softer than a typical truck thanks to an independent front suspension.
Dodge felt like a Dakota buyer could be anyone. Commercial buyers would like the Dakota’s more economical packaging but still high payload. Buyers who would normally buy a sedan might finally move up into a truck because the Dakota was a friendly entry point. The consumer truck buyers who didn’t want to go to a full-size platform had something that could still haul plywood with ease.
The timing of the original Dakota also couldn’t have been better. As Popular Science reported in October 1986, Chrysler vice president of truck operations, J.B. York, noted that every fifth vehicle on the road in 1986 had a box behind the passenger cabin. The Ford F-Series was the best-selling vehicle in the world at the time with sales of 562,507 units in 1985. Chrysler was well aware that the market for trucks was crowded. But America was hungry for more, and Chrysler felt that putting big truck features in a smaller truck would make the original Dakota stand out.
In a modern take, Hagerty claimed that the original Dakota was a “segment buster,” and I don’t think that was an exaggeration. What was neat was that Dodge achieved this victory on a budget. From Hagerty, which references the MotorWeek video below:
Back to the mid-size rig from Dodge. The fine folks at Motorweek got their hands on a 1987 Dodge Dakota with the optional 8-foot bed, V-6 engine, 2500-pound payload, automatic transmission, and the upscale LE trim package. This configuration is the mid-size truck’s primary value proposition, offering the carrying capacities of a big truck with a smaller footprint akin to the compacts available from GM and Ford. And much like the Chevrolet S-10’s 4.3-liter mill, the Dakota’s 3.9-liter V-6 is based on Chrysler’s 318-cu-in small-block V-8. While Motorweek didn’t much care for the V-6’s NVH characteristics, the lack of balance shafts might have been overshadowed by subsequent power and efficiency improvements (like EFI in 1988).
Handling was improved over that of larger rigs, partly due to the Dakota’s smaller size and utilization of passenger-car suspension components. Thanks to one Hal Sperlich, the Dakota was a masterpiece of parts-bin engineering. No, really—it’s a good thing, just like Hal’s two vehicular claims to fame: the Chrysler Minivan and Ford Mustang. While it’s hard to remember just how prevalent the regular-cab configuration was on American roads back then, the Dakota’s interior clearly offered a step up from competing compact trucks, especially if three people needed transport. With the LE’s upgraded trim, plasti-wood trim, cup holders, and velour seat fabrics, Dodge was experimenting early with a strategy that would practically print money for automakers in the future: selling upscale versions of yeoman fleet vehicles. Future Dakotas had it all: bucket seats, leather-wrapped steering wheels, upgraded audio systems, an eight-cylinder performance upgrade from Carroll Shelby, and even a folding soft top just to give the business model the shiniest of auras for its halo effect.
The 1987 Dakota was such a leap that some publications performed shootouts where the Dakota competed against full-size fare, sometimes coming out favorably in terms of acceleration and handling.
The original Dakota spawned quite a few grail-worthy editions, namely the aforementioned Shelby, the convertible, and the Li’l Red Express. But the Dakota was also just great on its own. In 1991, Dodge introduced the 170 HP 5.2-liter LA V8 into the Dakota, marking the beginning of being able to get V8 power in a Dakota without having to slap a Shelby badge on it first. A year later, this V8 would evolve into the 5.2-liter Magnum V8, which offered 230 HP on deck.
This would put Dodge in an interesting position. The hottest engine in a Ford Ranger in 1992 was the 4.0-liter Cologne V6, which at its very hottest made 160 HP at the time. The GMC Syclone had been discontinued by this point, and it was a pretty rare model anyway. The hottest engine for the Chevrolet S-10 at the time was a 4.3-liter V6, which was good for 195 HP. But even then, no other compact or midsize truck was available with a V8, but the Dakota was.
Like A Baby Big Rig
Development on the sequel to the original Dakota began in 1991, and the truck was designed to capitalize on the Dakota’s strengths. But this time, Dodge went hard on styling.
According to MotorTrend, the second-generation Dakota was intended to give everyone more of what they wanted:
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.
The second-generation Dakota was being developed at the same time the iconic second-generation Ram was, and the Dakota would end up inheriting its micro big-rig style. However, MotorTrend notes, the 1997 Dakota, which launched in 1996, wasn’t just a scaled-down Ram. Dennis Myles, who worked under design director John R. Starr, gave the truck a more curvaceous and more sporty body than the Ram. This is a nod to the fact that the Dakota was supposed to be Dodge’s sport truck. Yet, it’s still a truck, so it was also designed to accommodate large off-road tires and was still designed to do some heavy work.
Dodge also worked pretty hard to make the new Dakota more people-friendly, too. From MotorTrend:
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.
MotorTrend continued by talking about how Dodge stiffened the frame, made the cab quieter, and refined the Dakota’s manufacturing process for ease of assembly. Other changes on the manufacturing side called for tighter tolerances, smaller panel gaps, tighter seams, and overall better quality than the truck of the 1980s. MotorTrend sure liked the changes:
We noticed during our test that the ’97 has far better overall structural integrity and a quieter demeanor than its predecessor. This is immediately obvious from the lack of shudder from the instrument panel, steering column, and body when driving on broken road surfaces.
[…]
The ride and handling improvement over the previous Dakota is immediately obvious, even during a short drive. Indeed, from an engineering standpoint, this is what seems most improved. In front, two-wheel-drive Dakotas use longer, redesigned unequal-length upper and lower control arms with coil springs. Four-wheel-drive models feature a fully independent torsion-bar setup. In back, the arrangement is the standard leaf springs with a solid axle that’s been stretched two inches for a wider track.
Our two-wheel-drive SLT with the handling and tire package carved through the slalom at 59.6 mph with exceptional crispness and poise, particularly for an unloaded pickup. Adding to this truck’s surer feel is a quicker steering ratio, which lends sharper handling response. The resulting high-speed behavior is confidence-inspiring and closer to that of a taut rear-drive coupe than you’ll believe until you try it.
By all accounts, it had seemed as if Dodge had done it again. The new Dakota was everything that the old one was, but more. The 5.2-liter Magnum V8 made a return as well, but if you want the coolest second-generation Dodge Dakota, waiting just one extra year for 1998 meant that you could get something really cool.
The Only V8 Midsize Muscle Truck Of The ’90s
Come 1998, Dodge got properly fun with the Dakota with the introduction of the R/T. This truck was more than just sporty style, as it introduced a second V8 to the Dakota lineup and then complemented it with a handling and style package. From Dodge:
The 1998 Dodge Dakota, already best-in-class with its 5.2-liter Magnum V-8 engine, sets the performance bar even higher with the R/T’s 250-horsepower 5.9-liter Magnum V-8 engine. Wearing new oversized 17-inch wheels and P255/55 R17 tires, the Dakota R/T has a thicker rear stabilizer bar, lowered suspension, and limited-slip rear differential. And in true street vehicle fashion, R/T will only be offered in a 4X2 configuration. The result is a truck enthusiast’s dream: aggressive looks combined with nimble ride, precise handling, stable cornering and an exceptionally responsive power train.
“The key words here are ‘enhanced performance,'” said Bernard Robertson, Vice President – Engine Technologies and General Manager of Truck Operations. “We took our already-proven 1997 Dodge Dakota and further pushed it to the limits with the R/T. The result is a truck that offers an even more exhilarating experience and still over-delivers on style, capability and comfort.”
Dodge Dakota, the only compact truck with a V-8, now offers a choice of two V-8 engine sizes with the addition of Dakota R/T’s 5.9-liter engine. The 250 horsepower and 345 lb-ft. of torque is maximized with a performance-tuned dual inlet stainless steel exhaust system. The heavy-duty electronic four- speed automatic transmission (46RE) is standard with the 5.9 V-8.
In addition to the goodies noted above, Dodge says that the R/T has a front 15mm stabilizer bar and a 19mm rear stabilizer bar for extra stiffness. That rear bar was noted to be 9mm thicker than the one found in the regular truck. Dodge says it further tuned the suspension, which was dropped 19mm, more for road feel rather than hauling. Backing all of this up is a four-speed 46RE automatic driving only the rear wheels through a limited-slip differential. Stopping power was handled through 11.3-inch discs up front and a pair of drums in the rear.
Sadly, I did not find a review by the charismatic John Davis of MotorWeek, but MotorTrend Television TNN did a pretty sweet video review:
Hot Rod magazine also took one out onto the track and found out that it was almost as fast as a pony car:
Although the horsepower peak is at 4,400 rpm, the TorqueFlite upshifts at 5,200-impressive, considering the tachometer claims a 4,700-rpm redline. We know from experience that the rev limiter will intervene before 5,500 rpm, so the tranny programming is pleasantly aggressive. Most runs yielded times in the 14.90s, and after we figured out the best launch and manually shifted at 5,300 rpm, we pulled out a 14.85 at 91 mph, our best that day.
We should have been impressed. The truck was clicking off faster times than a new Mustang GT delivers-times that were right in line with some stock 5.0L Mustangs. But we got the same feeling at the track that we had on the street: There was power that we weren’t getting, and we wanted it. Several drivers got behind the wheel of the R/T and felt the same sensation. Part throttle: caged animal. Full throttle: tranquilized beast. So what was the deal? We’re not sure. Our dyno test (see “Modern Muscle: Who’s Jivin’ Who?” May ’98) showed that the R/T made 191 hp at the wheels. That isn’t bad, but this engine feels like it’s capable of more.
Overall, the Dakota R/T is a blast to drive and a great truck. Its dimensions make it as easy to live with as most cars, and the Club Cab’s back seat is probably more useful than that of a Camaro. Although the EPA fuel economy rating is a 13/18 split, we saw close to 20 mpg, despite our constant strip abuse and OD-off puttering around town.
You were able to buy the truck in two cab configurations and four colors. That’s it. There was no 4×4 option or a manual. Buying the R/T also brought along some downsides. A 1998 Dakota was rated to tow as much as 6,700 pounds. However, if you optioned your truck as an R/T, and thus got the tuned suspension, the official towing capacity fell to a paltry 2,000 pounds.
The R/T also made you pony up cash with a price of $19,205 for the R/T. Cars.com notes that, confusingly, the engine and transmission were prerequisites for the R/T package, but technically, they weren’t directly part of it in the catalogue. Thus, the engine was a $1,585 option, and the transmission added another $950. The wheels, tires, and handling gear added another $2,275. So, when all was said and done, you’re looking at $4,810 over a standard truck.
One Of A Rare Breed
Despite the fiery upgrades, the R/T was never a popular model. Dodge made as many of them as people were willing to scoop up, and the grand total was just 16,496 Dakota R/Ts sold between 1998 and 2003. That’s nothing compared to the well over 100,000 units the regular Dakota sold each year back in those days.
The Dodge Dakota R/T was also sort of a rare kind of beast. Sure, the Dakota continued with a V8 after this, but the magic of the R/T was never replicated. The Dakota R/T did make a return in 2006, but only as a cosmetics package. To its credit, Chevy dropped a V8 into its Colorado in 2009 and then gave it a handling package and a cosmetics package, but even that one didn’t last. Today, your closest choice for a midsize muscle truck is a Ford Ranger Raptor, and that’s not a street truck.
That makes the Dakota R/T one of the last dying breaths of the factory-built midsize muscle truck. The Dakota R/T was perhaps the silly answer to the question of “what if a pony car were a truck?” and the automotive world was better for it. Maybe, if we’re lucky, we’ll see this craziness again in the future.
Top graphic image: Dodge
I remember when these came out. I had a number of acquaintances with these and ran into a number of them on the street back in the day. To be honest I never got the attraction, they were fast and handled well /for a truck/, but were also compromised as a truck with a dismal tow rating and load capacity. and IMO unlike the Lightning they weren’t fast enough to justify that compromise. Hot Rod either got a ringer, was paid by Dodge to juice their review, or their sea-level “correction factor” was doing a lot of heavy lifting. These trucks were mid to high 15s in the 1/4, they weren’t competition for my 172hp Mk3 GTI-VR6, let alone a 4.6L SN95.
This makes me wonder one question if we can put expanding rooms on an RV, the name escapes me, why can’t we do that with a pickup truck bed? I mean sport truck with a 4 foot bed easy to park in town but need some plywood hit a button extend the bed another 8 foot and whoop there it is. It might require a adjustable axle for heavy shit but that doesn’t mean new discovery semis use it.
Damn I know why some members diss me here. They are jealous. Lol
My brother had a 2nd gen V8 Dakota – the 5.2L not the R/T. Replaced a Ranger and it was the worst of both worlds. Compact size with full size thirst. He replaced it with a 2000 Silverado.
That generation of Dakota was the first car I bought after graduating college, and the first (and only of the only few) I’ve bought brand new.That was back in the days when you could option your car pretty much a la carte. I got the V6 SLT Extended cab 4×4, 5 speed manual, cloth seats, power locks but no power windows, no sliding rear window, and the top-of-the-line many speaker stereo (priorities, man!). Loved that truck so much.
I get it, but I’m no fan of the Chrysler automatic transmissions. I’ll take a 5.2 with a 5-speed.
I had a 99 R/T 5.9 for a couple years. My non-car buddy bought it and kinda neglected it. New tires, brakes and both o2 sensors. Rear brakes were 10” not 11”. What? That thing would chirp into 3rd. Lots of donuts in that. We called it the Banana. Super fun to drive, but was hard to get power down. I used it as a truck a lot. Didn’t love the 4 speed auto though, it was always hunting gears in traffic. Got about 11 mpg in mostly suburban driving. Used oil too. There was a kit for that motor for the plenum. Hughes I think? Sold it to take the kids on vacation, it was supposed to be a flip. I got my money back, but the girls were unhappy the wife made me sell it.
This truck and the Tacoma X-Runner are some of my absolute favorite trucks and I’d love to own either one someday, something about the Dakota R/T especially in red and with a regular cab just like in the lead photo seems so cool. Problem is at least around here in the Midwest most of the R/T’s got beaten to death and/or rusted away so the few nice ones that are left are hard to find and at this point even harder to afford.
I also just have a love and nostalgia for Dakota’s in general, especially the first gen. My Dad had a red 93 extended cab Dakota Sport with the 3.9 Magnum V6, aluminum wheels and of course some crazy silver striping down the sides. It was the truck I grew up in and the one that made a real impact on me and my love for all things automotive. Dad eventually got rid of it when it had about 280,000-ish miles and its second transmission was letting go and I was sad to see it leave. One of these days if I can find one just like it I’m gonna buy one but that’s easier said than done as again just like the R/T’s the vast majority of first gen Dakota’s around here suffered a similar fate.
Also thanks for yet another wonderful article Mercedes!