I’ve given it some thought over the years, and there’s only one truck that I’ve seriously considered as a replacement for my F-100, and this is it. In fact, it’s almost a perfect update on the Ford, with the benefits of modern technology. Don’t laugh, but I’ll take mine with the 2.7 liter four cylinder. It’s got more horsepower (150) than the Ford (129), and a pretty healthy dose of torque. It’s not like I’m planning on pulling 10,000 pound trailers down the road. Oh wait; I actually have done that with the Ford… Read More >
Ford’s President of the Americas, Mark Fields tells Automotive News [sub] that production of its full sized SUV’s are being ramped up as demand has unexpectedly outstripped dwindling inventories. Due to sales of the Ford Expedition rising 45 percent in December and the Lincoln Navigator jumping 60 percent, Ford see this as a good opportunity to take advantage of this new customer confidence. Fields didn’t disclose details about the production bump, but given long term trends in full-sized sales and oil prices, we’re thinking it shouldn’t be too dramatic. Read More >
According to our data, the full-size pickup segment declined by 29.4 percent last year. Of all full-sized pickups, the Chevy Silverado lost the most volume, dropping 32 percent and an eye-popping 148,521 units compared to 2008. GMC Sierra dropped 33.6 percent, or about 56k units. Overall, GM shed half a million pickup sales last year, as its total truck sales fell to 1.2 million. When you’re losing that kind of volume in a shrinking segment, you know it’s time for a hold-em-or-fold-em moment. According to the Detroit News, GM is doubling down on its full-sized truck ambitions, allocating “several hundred million” of your tax dollars towards a re-working of the GMT 900-based trucks.
About a year ago, Nissan’s response to nose-diving truck sales betrayed some serious ambivalence about chasing the profitable-yet-dangerous segment. Its first plan was to rebadge the new Ram, but that deal has fallen apart in the wake of Chrysler’s shotgun wedding to Fiat. At a loss for options, Nissan canceled the Quest, QX56 and Armada and started tooling up its Canton plant to produce commercial vehicles. It looked like Nissan’s days in the truck market were over. Now, USA Today reports that Nissan is developing a new full-sized pickup (and SUV) after all. By itself. Who’d have thunk it?
Pickup Truckdef: a vehicle designed to haul cargo that the owner picks up and places into its cargo bed.
I may be in the minority, but that’s how I use my truck. I haul gravel, compost, dirt, and mulch, and shovel it out the back, which is the most efficient way to do it, short of a dump bed. I also haul junk to to the dump, and load loose items by tossing them over the side of my truck’s bed, and unload them the same way. I can readily lean over into my bed’s side and reach all the items in there. I easily tip large appliances single handedly into and out of the bed. That’s why I have a truck, and that’s what I expect it to be able to do. But there are times when I think I might like to ride in something a little more comfortable and safe than my 1966 Ford F-100. So I head down to my local Ford dealer and check out a new truck, starting with the business end: Read More >
Pickuptrucks.com‘s Mike Levine snapped this shot of Honda’s NAIAS booth, indicating that the Motor Company might not be quite as proud of its unibody truck as it once was. Ridgeline sold 16,464 units last year, less than half of its 2008 volume. Honda’s Alabama plant, where the Ridgeline is assembled alongside the Pilot, saw its output drop 35 percent in 2009. Having tried the unibody option that so many formerly truck-dependent firms now see as an alternative to body-on-frame offerings, it seems doubtful that Honda would recommend it to any of them. When it comes to the truck market, there are no easy answers.
GM’s Australian Holden division has been developing the kind of big-bore RWD vehicles we tend to think of as being quintessentially American for quite some time. But every time GM hints at repatriating one of these old-school machines to its spiritual homeland in the states, something goes terribly wrong. One classic example of this disfunction was the offshoot of GM’s last effort to bring Holdens stateside as the Pontiac G8, the G8 Sport Truck, a rebadge of Holden’s Ute. The travails of the G8 have been well documented, but the Sport Truck was killed before it even had the chance to lose GM money and be cut along with the Pontiac brand. Now, just as the memory of that savage tease was fading, GM’s Mark Reuss reveals that the El Camino could be back after all.
We’re at a difficult phase in the global economy. Economists would have you believe that we’re out of recession and things are starting to look rosy. But just talk to someone like Peter Schiff and he’d have you believe that a second downturn is inevitable. It really is tough to say where the economy will go and it’s showing in the car market. USA Today reports that Toyota are looking at their 4Runner & FJ Cruiser models and wondering whether to build a new generation or not.
Normally TTAC shies away from going too crazy with daily themes, but today we’ve got such a backlog of truck-related news and analysis we’re going to go ahead and dub today Truck Thursday. After all, few automakers have invested much in trucks and SUVs since gas prices began rising in 2008, and now the segment stands at a crossroads. Firms like Toyota, which invested too much too late in the truck and SUV market have to figure out how to manage its overcapacity. Firms like GM and Chrysler, which got bad reps for becoming overdependent on trucks and utes are faced with the challenge of keeping much-needed profits flowing while weaning themselves off their body-on-frame addictions. New challengers like Mahindra are headed into the market with a utilitarian ethos that’s been missing from the segment for decades, and established players are responding. Old brands like HUMMER are dying on the vine. The result is a truck market that’s rife with change and transition. Join us as we delve into this changing world of trucks and SUVs today, during TTAC’s celebration of Truck Thursday.
I’ll wrap up Van Sunday with this collection of vans that fit the stereotype of the kind of vehicle you warn children about. Why? because I have a compulsion (no, not that kind) to document all the old vehicles in Eugene, no matter what they are. Maybe these are of limited interest today, but who knows; fifty or a hundred years from now they’ll be a time capsule. Right! Actually, these snub-nose Econolines are getting pretty rare. More unhealthy vans: Read More >
Running into this Japanese Domestic Market Toyota Hi-Ace in Eugene was about as unusual as the cold weather that week. It was a frosty December morning after an overnight low in the single digits; pretty uncommon hereabouts. Well, it did have British Columbia plates on it, so that helps explains it. But it’s right hand drive, and a long way from home. Read More >
The last post on Mercedes campers got me thinking (wistfully) about the open road and how I have a grand total of four digital photos I could share with you from our six years and thirty-five thousand miles worth of travels in our 1977 Chinook. Like lots of amateur photographers, I have boxes and boxes of prints from our early years, and our first two kids. Guilt and a nagging wife kept me shooting film through our younger son’s childhood. And I took some nice shoots in a few dramatic places with the Chinook, on film. I transitioned very late to digital, partly because I couldn’t bear to give up the Canon 35mm rangefinder I bought new in ’77 and still works perfectly (I’m on my second digital, and the lens motor is already acting up). Read More >
Truck Saturdays is when I can safely indulge my love of big rigs. And BigLorryBlog is the place to do it. Here’s a few selections picked for your truck viewing pleasure. This is described as a 325-ton transformer and 6000hp of go-power courtesy of five 8×8 Tractomas monster pullers and a 10×10 Tractomas pusher up the back crossing a bridge. Here’s another view: Read More >
You want see the power of torque? Watch these over-boosted big rigs lift front wheels and twist frames as they haul full (oversize?) loads up a hill at the 2009 Rodeo du Camion in Quebec. There’s several more races to chose from after the first. Who said those Canucks were all mild-mannered socialists?
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