A friend who has traveled extensively in the Middle East pointed out to me that Toyota pickups, widely known for their indestructibility, are the camions of choice for all those revolutionaries, insurgents and just plain bad guys waging war in Afghanistan, Iraq and East Africa, where the day-and-night symphony is the kah-chunk of a mortar round being lobbed or the brap-brap-brap of automatic small arms fire.

Known in the war business as “technicals,” these battle-scarred Toyotas are usually equipped with .50-caliber machine guns, their tripods mounted on heavy steel plates bolted to the pickup’s bed. You frequently see technicals in jittery combat footage on the evening news, the guns being swiveled from side to side by a fellow who looks like he’s on the tail end of a serious meth jag.

Around these parts – we write this review from relatively peaceful Northern California – the Toyota pickups are mercifully known simply as Tundras. The one we tested is the upscale, western-themed 1794 edition. It’s a name that appears to be Toyota’s marketing-think way of mimicking (if a bit obscurely) every other truck maker eager to get the rubes in the door, ready to shell out fifty large for a pickup. (Our test truck had a retail price of $48,880.) In the eyes of many, the western United States is still a somewhat romantic notion, an ideal, a myth, a place where trucks are trucks and if you name them after something with a western motif, you’re sure to attract customers like flies onto horse droppings. Chrysler Corporation’s Ram brand has its Laramie pickup. GM has its Chevrolet Silverado High Country. And Ford has its F-150 King Ranch. Now that seems like an idea; let’s name it after a ranch.

Conveniently, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Texas has a factory spread over some 2,600 acres near San Antonio. And the year 1794, according to Toyota Internet lore, is when the Spanish crown gave Juan Ignacio de Casanova a “royal grant” for “more than 24,000 acres” of what became a huge ranch in the San Antonio area. The ranch was passed down through the family and became known as the JLC Ranch. Toyota bought it in 2003 and that’s where they build Tundras.

Wow. This is one storied truck, this Tundra. What about the truck itself? By jumping into the U.S. truck swamp, Toyota has carved out a pretty difficult trail to slog through. American pickup trucks are unique. No other country really does trucks the way we do, and it may be that no other country wants to do trucks the way we do. Never mind. In this country, trucks sell. The Ford F-150 pickup is perennially the best-selling vehicle in the U.S., racing away from all those Fusions, Camrys and Accords. There’s a reason for this.

Pickups, no matter who makes them, are inherently useful – some domestic versions come in hundreds of variations (different configurations of bed, cabin, wheelbase, length, engine, wheels and tires; types of suspension, transmission, towing capacity) and they will haul just about anything. For practical reasons and for romantic or even mythic reasons, Americans buy pickup trucks by the millions.

In going after this big-truck market, Toyota has done okay, but nothing spectacular. In model year 2007, Toyota introduced the second-generation Tundra (its first generation came here in 2000) and ballyhooed its American-ness. Toyota said it had sent engineers and researchers all over the country, asking truck owners what they wanted in a truck. Then Toyota introduced the new Tundra. This Toyota foray into the big  leagues didn’t faze Ford a bit. (Indeed, the F-150 has outsold the current generation Tundra ever since the second-gen Tundra’s introduction. In 2008, according to the stats mavens at goodcarbadcar.net, Toyota sold 137,249 Tundras, compared with Ford’s 2008 sales of 515,513 F-150s. In 2013, the trend against Toyota was worse: 112,732 Tundras were sold, compared with 763,402 Ford F-150s.)

Not that the Tundra is a bad truck or a diminutive one. The one we tested was huge (228.9 inches long, and weighing nearly three tons) and very tall (76.4 inches). It had running boards and it had a big cab (this was the Crewmax model) that would hold five husky ranchhands. But the workhorse bed in back of that cab is only five and a half feet long, kind of a wimpy bed for a pickup. (In other Tundras, where the people cabin is smaller, you can have a bed up to eight feet long.)

The Tundra comes with a 5.7-liter, 381-horsepower V8, and all those horses are managed by a six-speed automatic transmission; fuel mileage is predictably low – 13/17 mpg, city/highway. Our test truck came with four-wheel-drive, engine and transmission cooler and a towing capacity of 10,400 pounds. It had all the bits and pieces that add up to the comfy-truck 1794 moniker, such as a high-falutin’ stereo, navigation, rear view camera, those heated and ventilated leather seats (isn’t this a bit much for a ranch truck?), and a deep center console cubby that would easily hold a newborn calf, but will probably be limited to a laptop.

On the road, the Tundra has enough power to get out of its own way, and it’s relatively quiet (but not as quiet as the upscale products of Toyota’s Lexus division.) The Tundra towers over the rest of the traffic and its bulk, nay its utter massiveness, gives you the feeling that the tiny little Civic one lane over, the one that keeps absentmindedly edging into your lane, could be snuffed out just like that.

But no. We will leave that kind of behavior to the technicals out there in the desert, jouncing along some wasted track at 50 miles an hour, guys in the back loading up the fifty.

As we said, it’s a truck with many lives.

For more consumer information on cars, check these Web sites:

Safety data can be found at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS)  and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

Reliability information can be seen in the  dependability studies conducted by J.D. Power; and at Consumer Reports.

Fuel mileage figures are available at this site, maintained by the U.S. Department of Energy.

For trivia lovers: the sticker you see on the window of every new car for sale in the United States is known in the auto industry as the “Monroney.” It is named for U.S. Senator Almer Stilwell (Mike) Monroney, the Oklahoma Democrat who sponsored the Automobile Information Disclosure Act of 1958, which required all new cars to have labels that detail the price of the car and its options.