We’ve had many exciting long-term cars over the years, but this one is in the running for being our favourite of all time. It’s also been the one with the most nicknames.

Some have called it Bruce, The Brute, Black Magic, Meneer and there are probably more. It’s been with us for almost a year now, and the tearful goodbye is imminent.

Bruce tugged at our heart strings from the word go with its brawny V8 performance and tail-happy antics. It’s the closest thing to a true American muscle car that we can buy here in SA and it offers incredible bang for the buck at its price tag of just over R300K.

The new Ute, which would have hit showrooms by the time you read this, will be a more sophisticated and slightly more expensive beast, so perhaps this Ute is the last of its kind.

Its chassis is hardly sophisticated, so wild oversteer is incredibly easy to provoke — this Ute can be bags of fun in the right hands and incredibly dangerous in the wrong set of circumstances. Unlike the new one, there’s no traction control trying to tame this beast.

While not exactly lacking in brutality, we nonetheless treated Bruce to a makeover around the middle of its term here, with a CRD free-flow exhaust system that liberated around 41kW more power and made that dragon-like exhaust growl even more spine tingling.

Perhaps that was a bad move when one considers that it’s made saying goodbye even harder…