1981 Toyota Pickup 4x4 Deluxe with Iconic Livery Is Today's Bring a Trailer Pick

• The third-gen Toyota Pickup was the first to offer four-wheel drive from the factory and helped popularize small off-road pickups.

• The factory graphics seen here are an early version of what became Toyota's famous striped racing livery, later seen on Ivan Stewart's trucks.

• Very clean but not entirely original, this truck looks showroom fresh, but you won't feel guilty enjoying it in the wild.

Toyota began selling fun, frugal, and famously durable compact pickups in America in 1964, but it wasn't until 1979's third-gen Toyota Pickup that it found its modern small hauler formula. That spring, for the first time, the four-wheel-drive Toyota Pickup rolled onto dealer lots, and soon after onto dirt trails and dunes. Now it could actually take you to the kinds of remote deserts and mountaintops so often depicted in 1970s mini-truck ads and keep up with Jeep CJ-7s once there. Buyers loved it, and the same recipe underpins today's Tacoma.

This 1981 Toyota Pickup 4x4 Deluxe up for auction on Bring a Trailer—which like Car and Driver is part of Hearst Autos—harks back to this early era of the Toyota off-road truck in more ways than one.

The vivid paint scheme, likely designed by Rollin "Molly" Sanders, a longtime Toyota graphic design consultant who later helped create the Lexus "L" logo, is an early version of what became Toyota's famous striped racing livery. In the 1970s, Sanders had designed custom schemes for earlier Toyota pickups, including a couple of Yamaha promotional collaborations, the "Yamahaulers." In 1981, Toyota offered two versions of this scheme on its 1981 and 1982 Sport Trucks, blue or red with yellow and orange stripes.

By 1983, the stripes had become the company's racing livery, and the scheme would be forever associated with Toyota Pickups thanks to the off-road successes of Ivan "Ironman" Stewart. Though there aren't too many pictures from the time, Stewart's earliest Toyota racers were actually third-generation models.

Toyota did a lot of homework to create the third-gen pickup (the old Hilux name was dropped in the U.S. after 1976), including closely watching dealer and consumer reactions to an authorized four-wheel drive conversion of the previous pickup, the rare 1977–78 Toyota Wolverine. Dealers, like California's Downey Toyota, sold the Wolverines as fast as they could be built. No doubt this informal test directly influenced the third-gen truck's design, led by veteran Toyota engineer Minoru Oya.