What is the purpose of this exercise? All the vehicle manufacturers have done the math and have come up with the same answer: The more content you put into a product, the more money you can make on it. It's more profitable to sell 500,000 trucks for $50K each than to sell a million trucks for $25K each. Consider this: all the OEMs produce stripped-down small trucks for the third-world market. They could easily import US-legal versions of these vehicles and sell them for less than 20 grand apiece. Why don't they? Because there's no profit in it, and they would just cannibalize their profitable mid-size truck business.
The manufacturers DO make stripped-down versions of their full-size pickups. They're called "work trucks" and you can go to one of their web sites and spec one out. A 3/4 ton Chevy work truck with no options lists for about $34K. But for 20-30 percent more you can get a loaded vehicle; most individuals will buy the vehicle they want rather than the one they need. Work trucks sell to fleets, where the $10K difference between a stripper and a loaded truck is a lot of money when you're buying 100 vehicles.
Do you think another OEM will come along and build a truck for this presumably under-served market? That's not entirely out of the question. There are a number of suppliers who can fully engineer a vehicle for a well-funded investor. (Magna International comes to mind.) There's a solid supplier base who can produce all the components, leaving only final assembly for the startup. But you can forget about this startup building cheap trucks. The formula for a startup car company goes like this: find an under-served niche market, and build a product you can sell at a premium price. That's the formula used successfully by Tesla and unsuccessfully by DeLorean. It's also the business plan of the new Motus motorcycle company. But the stripped down truck market is NOT underserved, and an investor trying to compete in it would find it impossible to compete on price.
The Checker company survived by serving a market niche. Their products were NOT cheap. I haven't studied the reasons for the demise of Checker, but I assume a major factor was competition from the much cheaper sedans sold by the Big Three.
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