It's a "truck". I guess you could tell her that SUV is a type of truck, and pickup is another type of truck.
^ This.
I think a lot of you are saying a truck can only have a bed and rear leafs and so on, but what you mean is a PICKUP truck. There are lots of different kinds of trucks: Box trucks (some people call them "moving vans"), refrigerated trucks, lets not forget tractor-trailer trucks. Many of those don't have a bed box, or leafs in the rear. Why can't true body on frame SUVs be considered another kind of truck?
It should also be considered that a lot of the earlier SUVs like Suburban, Explorer, Tahoe, etc. were just a pickup rolling chassis with a wagon-style body dropped on it.
Also, the first 4Runners were pretty much just a mini pickup with the rear of the cab chopped off, a factory camper shell, with carpeting and a bench seat in the bed area (and a power window in the tailgate). True that starting with the 3rd gen, the 4Runner got its own chassis, but is it not still a truck chassis? Especially when so much of the 4Runner and Tacoma are interchangeable, I mean, the engine, the front suspension, transmission, transfer-case, ARB bumper, some people have even done whole Tacoma front end conversions.
The last point I would like to make, is that if you look at ford's lineup in 1932, the coupe, sedan (which was more like today's SUVs) and pickup truck were all the same chassis, and in fact almost the same exact vehicle from the b- pillars forward. This means that the first ford pickups were actually built on a car chassis.
Im sorry, but the Toyota 4Runner is a truck.
