This No-Reserve 1997 Toyota Tacoma Is a Reminder of When Small Trucks Stayed Small

A clean, no-reserve 1997 Toyota Tacoma LX XtraCab V6 4x4 is currently up for bid on Hagerty Marketplace, part of the second wave of "The Generous Collection" — a trove of long-stored vehicles being sold off without reserve. This particular XtraCab shows 180,600 miles, rides on aftermarket wheels with Warn manually locking front hubs, and came from the factory loaded with power windows, power locks, a cassette/CD stereo, and even a front bench seat for occasional five-passenger duty. It's a humble truck. It's also a surprisingly good excuse to talk about an entire era of pickups that got everything right by staying small.

Compact trucks weren't always a novelty. The segment really took off in the U.S. during the early 1980s, when Chevrolet launched the S-10 for 1982 and Ford followed a year later with the Ranger. Dodge joined in 1987 with the Dakota, splitting the difference between compact and full-size. Toyota and Datsun/Nissan had already been selling small four-cylinder pickups here for years, and by the mid-1990s the segment was crowded with genuinely tiny, genuinely useful trucks. Toyota's own entry got a major upgrade for 1995, when the long-running Toyota Truck was replaced by the all-new Tacoma, bringing along a torquey 3.4-liter V6 that quickly built a reputation for outlasting the rest of the vehicle.

What's remarkable, looking back, is just how small "small" used to mean. A two-door, short-bed first-generation Tacoma stretches around 175 inches bumper to bumper, shorter than a Toyota Corolla sedan. Compare that to today's trucks, where even the smallest models sold in the U.S. dwarf their 1990s ancestors, and it's easy to see why enthusiasts have started circling back to this era. These trucks are light, easy to park, easy to work on, and still perfectly capable of hauling mulch or towing a small trailer, which is everything a truck is actually asked to do most of the time.

That renewed interest shows up in the numbers, too. Hagerty's valuation tools don't yet carry a dedicated Price Guide entry for the first-generation Tacoma, but Hagerty's own market research has tracked its insurance quote values climbing roughly 30 percent since 2021, and low-mile examples have posted eye-catching results at auction, including one XtraCab that sold for more than $47,000. The related, and much rarer, Toyota T100 full-size pickup, which shared the Tacoma's V6, averages a comparatively modest insured value, underscoring how much of the current small-truck premium is tied to that first Tacoma's compact, do-it-all reputation. Toyota's earlier, pre-Tacoma Pickup is already tracked in Hagerty's Price Guide, like this 1988 Toyota Pickup SR5, and gives a useful read on where values for the segment's earlier trucks stand.

Toyota wasn't alone in building small trucks that are aging well. The Chevy S-10 and Ford Ranger both proved a compact truck could be a mainstream hit, moving well over a million units apiece over their runs, while Nissan's Hardbody held its own with rugged four-cylinder and V6 options through the decade. None of these currently carry individual valuations in Hagerty's Price Guide the way older classics do, but that's less a sign of disinterest than of a market still catching up to demand, the same position first-generation Tacomas were in a few years ago, before insurance quotes and marketplace sales started telling a different story. Anyone curious can track the broader trend using Hagerty's valuation tools, which pull from real sales, insured values, and quote data rather than guesswork.

This Tacoma is only one of more than 130 vehicles being offered in this round of The Generous Collection. It joins a similarly overlooked-turned-desirable machine also climbing in value, the modified 1993 AM General M998 Humvee we covered recently, another once-affordable oddball now finding real demand. Small, honest, and increasingly hard to find in good shape is the recipe drawing bidders to trucks like this Tacoma, and it's a recipe the market seems only more interested in as time goes on.