Honda Built A One-Off Civic Type R Pickup Truck And It’s Glorious

Here in the UK, pickup trucks aren’t really a thing outside of super-rural farm yards. However, if there’s one way to get us excited about truckin’ it’s to take a lairy, bewinged hot hatch and convert it to have a flatbed.

That’s exactly what a crackpot team of engineers at Honda UK have done. The one-off concept was built at the firm’s Swindon plant using a pre-production Civic Type R that was presumably just lying around waiting to be crushed.

The team ripped out everything rear of the B-pillar and replaced it with a flatbed loading bay. The iconic and divisive rear wing remains, but can be lifted out of the way should you need to actually put anything in the back.

The pickup uses identical mechanical gubbins to the standard car, so that’s 316bhp and 295lb ft of torque from a 2.0-litre turbocharged VTEC engine going through the front wheels. Honda estimates the pickup Type R could do the 0-60mph sprint in under six seconds before topping out at 165mph.

Alyn James, project lead, said: “We have a special projects division at the factory in Swindon and this project was a fantastic opportunity for the team to show just what their creative minds could do.

“The passion that our engineers have for Honda is shown in our latest creation and we are even considering taking it to the Nurburgring to see if we can take the record for the fastest front wheel drive pickup truck!”
Now that is something we’d like to see!