For Sale: Rare Ssangyong Pickup With a Ford V8, Exhaust Stacks, And a Bizarre Story

Odds are pretty good that you've never even heard of a Ssangyon Actyon Sports before today. These Korean pickup trucks weren't ever sold here, but you'll sometimes see them pop up for sale, and they can cause a stir when they do. One just has, and it's not just interesting because it has a Ford V8 and big, silly exhaust stacks. While looking into its background, we finally found out how these forbidden foreign-market trucks reached Americans without getting crushed.

Listed for sale on Facebook Marketplace and a central Kansas for-sale group, this truck was the product of one of Korea's less successful carmakers. Ssangyong went from being its own company to being a subsidiary of the ill-fated Daewoo, then splitting off and falling into Mahindra's hands. This year, it got absorbed into an industrial conglomerate, so the rough ride continues.

Along the way, it produced a line of SUVs and pickups called the Actyon. Built from 2005 to 2018, they were mainly sold in southeast Asia and parts of Europe, but never in the United States. That'll raise red flags among those of you who know about our 25-year import ban, under which violating vehicles can be crushed. But this Ssangyong is fully legal, because it came here under a forgotten EV program.

The backstory of these Ssangyong pickups was shared by veteran auto technician Jim Schmidt, who claims credit for improving the infamous Oldsmobile diesel V8 back in the day. Schmidt told me that 4,000 of these Ssangyongs came to the U.S. in 2008 under the wing of an electrical utility that planned to convert them to EVs. (Side note: there was a company called Phoenix Motorcars that tried this too, though it's unclear if the ventures were related.)

But there was a problem: the trucks' coil springs couldn't bear the added weight of EV batteries, which were even heavier back in 2008 than they are today. It didn't help that batteries were pricier then, too. The program was a wash, and the trucks were liquidated for almost nothing. Schmidt recalled one acquaintance obtaining hundreds of them for just $500—that's total, not apiece.