Pickup truck emoji proposed to Unicode Consortium

The 8 page proposal, submitted by Nathan Maggio, details the importance of adding the iconic transportation vehicle into the existing emoji standard.

The sample image provided of the emoji shows a blue pickup truck in a traditional emoji vehicle design style. 

Google trend data is displayed within the proposal and the term “pickup truck” is compared to the term “ambulance” representing the ambulance emoji. The ambulance is often considered the median point of popular emoji vehicles.

The pickup truck shows significantly more interest than the ambulance in terms of search results, with interest for pickup trucks gradually increasing over a period of five years.

Image search trend data is also compared and once again the results show that a pickup truck emoji could see heavy usage in online messages.

Search results data is also compared on the major search engine websites (Google, Bing) and the pickup truck is shown to be equal in results to the ambulance.

Usage wise, the pickup truck emoji could be used to express hard work or to highlight phrases such as “falling off the back of a truck” or “keep truckin”. The symbol could be also used when something needs to be collected.

Natural sequencing options include the farmer, construction work and snowboarder who all rely on a pickup truck in some way. The truck could also be used in sequences with objects to represent something else (waste basket + pickup truck = garbage truck).

And finally, the emoji is heavily requested on social media - with American celebrity Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson making frequent requests for such an emoji.

If the proposal is successful, we could see a pickup truck emoji added in the next major emoji release after 12.0.