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				<title><![CDATA[Turbo Diesel Register - Articles - Miscellaneous Rants and Insights]]></title>
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					  <title><![CDATA[Another Turbo Diesel Register in 2010?]]></title>
					  <link>http://www.turbodieselregister.com/articlelive/articles/106/1/Another-Turbo-Diesel-Register-in-2010/Page1.html</link>
					  <description><![CDATA[
Another Turbo Diesel Register in 2010?&#160; What do you&#160;think about&#160;the&#160;possibility of a&#160;Nissan&#160;with a Cummins Turbo Diesel?&#160; Here is a link to an article we found at http://www.reuters.com&#160;titled,&#160;&#34;Nissan to build light work trucks in Mississippi.&#34;&#160; Take a look and express your thoughts.&#160; We know you'll have a few.]]></description>
					  <author>rpatton@ix.netcom.com (Robert Patton)</author>
					  <pubDate>Wed, 09 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0400</pubDate>
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					  <title><![CDATA[Will Dodge Build Rams for Nissan?]]></title>
					  <link>http://www.turbodieselregister.com/articlelive/articles/82/1/Will-Dodge-Build-Rams-for-Nissan/Page1.html</link>
					  <description><![CDATA[With the high cost of developing vehicles, partnerships are probably a necessary evil, or at least a reality, if Chrysler is to survive and prosper. Back in November, 2007 I wrote a blog about Chrysler partnering with Nissan. Following that, Nissan and Chrysler announced they will sell a Chrysler-badged version of the Nissan Versa in South America. Chrysler is also working on a version of its minivan that it will soon begin making for VW, and another small-car project with Chinese manufacturer Chery. No big deal for Ram enthusiasts, but now there&#8217;s more. Several sources report that a second Nissan product partnership is underway. This one involves full-size Ram pickups. Interested now?]]></description>
					  <author>kenfreund@yahoo.com (Ken Freund)</author>
					  <pubDate>Wed, 23 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500</pubDate>
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					  <title><![CDATA[Catch an &#39;09 Ram When You Can?]]></title>
					  <link>http://www.turbodieselregister.com/articlelive/articles/78/1/Catch-an-09-Ram-When-You-Can/Page1.html</link>
					  <description><![CDATA[For months people have been speculating on the &#8220;new&#8221; Ram for 2009. Chrysler wouldn&#8217;t say, which almost confirms by omission, that it would debut at the 2008 Detroit auto show (more properly the North American International Auto Show but the incongruity of &#8220;North American International&#8221; makes me think it&#8217;s a stupid name). There&#8217;s some debate about the engines. Will the 3.7-liter V-6 base engine be dropped in favor of the 4.0? Very likely&#8230;the 3.7 has a hard time hauling around a Dakota or a Liberty, never mind a full-size, and when was the last time you saw a redesigned truck that weighed less? The 4.7 will clear 300 hp, because it already does in other applications. That means the Hemi will have to be tweaked, although I&#8217;m not sure going to the full 6.1-liter size used by SRT is the right way to do it. And the big question: Will there be a Cummins V-6 or V-8 in a half-ton? It could easily be done (I drove one in 2004) but the &#8220;new management&#8221; at Chrysler hasn&#8217;t been in place that long, so we&#8217;ll have to wait and see. If I told you everything I know I&#8217;d be unemployed. Spies report the new Ram has coil springs, trailing arms and a Panhard rod in back, like some 1970&#8217;s pickups and modern &#8220;stock&#8221; cars. This wouldn&#8217;t surprise me because you can get a good ride, payload won&#8217;t be much more than 20% of truck weight, and Chrysler has it sorted in the porky Grand Cherokee/Commander/etc. A Watts linkage like the Durango would&#8217;ve been really neat. I had heard the Ram had a sloped forward grille - again a throwback to the &#8217;70s and not surprising given the Avenger and Charger do as well, but that the interior got the major part of the upgrade. Seems any truck more than a few years old is &#8220;dated&#8221; these days because they&#8217;re not being used as tools and farm implements, they&#8217;re being used as cars. And while the Challenger was taking first orders and those order slots, not the actual cars, were getting $15,000-20,000 on eBay, for a short time you could plainly see the 2009 Ram photo on a Mopar web page. Dodge claims it was a mistake, but we&#8217;ll never know because Executive Peon dismissals don&#8217;t merit press releases. Others think viral marketing and it was all planned. Conspiracy TDR theorists will say it&#8217;s just John Holmes getting even for forced retirement or a former stylist whose design was not chosen. Did you see it? What did you think? Do you care? If you can&#8217;t answer positively to all those questions better let Dodge know ASAP so they get the HD version right.]]></description>
					  <author>grwhale@gmail.com (G. R. Whale)</author>
					  <pubDate>Tue, 01 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500</pubDate>
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					  <title><![CDATA[Speculation - 2009 1500; 2010 Turbo Diesel?]]></title>
					  <link>http://www.turbodieselregister.com/articlelive/articles/76/1/Speculation---2009-1500-2010-Turbo-Diesel/Page1.html</link>
					  <description><![CDATA[Webmaster, Steve St. Laurent, found this photo in one of his many web surfing expeditions. It is common knowledge that the truck will be redesigned for the 1500 series customer for model year 2009 and for us Turbo Diesel owners in 2010. http://www.autoblog.com/2007/12/09/confirmed-2009-dodge-ram-pic-is-the-real-thing/ If you look at the source for this picture (Mopar online catalog), you'll realize that someone at Mopar made a huge mistake. Either that or they've sent us on a wild goose chase. Regardless, the picture of this 2009? 1500 truck leaves us with a big yawn. Aaahhh. We're not breaking any new ground with this truck. Looks like they're playing it safe at Auburn Hills. What do you think? Click on the &#34;Visit Site&#34; link below to post your thoughts.&#160; Have fun.]]></description>
					  <author>rpatton@turbodieselregister.com (Robin Patton)</author>
					  <pubDate>Wed, 12 Dec 2007 00:00:00 -0500</pubDate>
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					  <title><![CDATA[2007 SEMA Show]]></title>
					  <link>http://www.turbodieselregister.com/articlelive/articles/68/1/2007-SEMA-Show/Page1.html</link>
					  <description><![CDATA[I was asked by the TDR to cover the SEMA show for the magazine and the website. This being my first time at the event, I have to say it was overwhelming. I've seen it on TV shows and in magazines, so I thought I was prepared. But the sheer magnitude of the event is beyond what you could possibly envision. It's simply enormous! . . . . . .Click here for the full story including video and pictures]]></description>
					  <author>stevest@centurytel.net (Steve St.Laurent)</author>
					  <pubDate>Wed, 07 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0500</pubDate>
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					  <title><![CDATA[Biofuels?]]></title>
					  <link>http://www.turbodieselregister.com/articlelive/articles/67/1/Biofuels/Page1.html</link>
					  <description><![CDATA[
Recently, Volkswagen AG and Daimler AG of Germany purchased minority shares in biofuel manufacturer Choren Industries GmbH. (Another minority Choren shareholder is Royal Dutch Shell.) What&#8217;s particularly noteworthy about Choren Industries is the fact that it makes what is called &#34;friendly synthetic biofuel&#34; or second-generation biofuel. These second-gen fuels are made from cellulose-containing surplus materials such as woodchips, straw, or plant stalks, rather than from corn, wheat or sugar cane. The big advantage is that they don&#8217;t reduce our supply of human or animal foodstuffs, nor increase demand and prices of these commodities. Already here in North America--although biofuels have not reached the level of popularity as in Europe--price hikes for everything from bread to eggs to meat and poultry are being blamed at least partially on the tightened supply and subsequent higher costs of the grains used to produce foodstuffs. There is also concern that if grains such as corn are used extensively to produce biofuel, there will be far less reduction in carbon-dioxide compared to petroleum, because of the energy needed to plant, irrigate, harvest and transport the feedstocks to biofuel plants. On the other hand, if waste products such as cornstalks are used and collected while the corn is harvested, there will be considerable savings. Corn may still be used as food for humans or animal feed, while the leftovers are made into biofuel, significantly improving the carbon-dioxide tally. There&#8217;s another interesting angle to this. If the automotive industry controls the price of fuel, it will be to its advantage to hold down prices, to spur vehicle sales. This is the exact opposite of the oil industry. Follow the link below to post your&#160;take on all this.]]></description>
					  <author>kenfreund@yahoo.com (Ken Freund)</author>
					  <pubDate>Mon, 29 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400</pubDate>
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					  <title><![CDATA[Big Bucks Beats Big Horsepower]]></title>
					  <link>http://www.turbodieselregister.com/articlelive/articles/66/1/Big-Bucks-Beats-Big-Horsepower/Page1.html</link>
					  <description><![CDATA[Remember racing when all you needed was a good car, a good driver, and a little luck? Long gone I fear, replaced by the sponsor-driven world of motorsports. It&#8217;s gotten too expensive to go big-time racing without a sponsor, and big-time drivers frequently change series looking for the big-time salary (as would I). Follow the money, right? Somebody has to pay the fines when racers behave like racers rather than Nextel-Disney puppets, or somebody breaks a rule. This happens all the time from racing incidents, &#8220;avoidable contact&#8221; (no, I meant to hit him right in the jaw) and illegal equipment: Please pay $50,000 and lose 25 championship points (out of 5,000 or so). That&#8217;s cheap. In &#8220;world championship&#8221; Formula One, this summer&#8217;s brouhaha over Ferrari engineering documentation in a Maclaren employee&#8217;s possession resulted in, the Maclaren team out $100 million and all manufacturer points (the drivers are still in it) 2008. I&#8217;m guessing Max Mosley or Bernie Ecclestone, the power and money men behind F1, needed a new yacht. Here&#8217;s NASCAR&#8217;s money problem this year, decided in court and not on track: Cingular (partly owned by AT&#38;T at the time) coughed up $150 mil to sponsor the #31 car starting in 2001. When AT&#38;T expanded and bought up what it didn&#8217;t own of Cingular, it wished to change the logos to reflect the AT&#38;T name rather than the defunct Cingular name. Naturally Nextel/Sprint, which will spend $750 million over 10 years to be the series primary sponsor, cried foul, arguing that their contract was to be the only telecommunications company sponsor except for those already on board. It probably didn&#8217;t help that most surveys from the first half of 2007 found Nextel/Sprint ranked well-behind leaders Verizon and AT&#38;T in terms of revenue, subscribers, added subscribers per quarter (what Wall Street likes), or customer service. This was Nextel/Sprint&#8217;s best chance to get AT&#38;T out of the NASCAR picture(s). Personally, I think since AT&#38;T was already a partial sponsor of the 31 they should be able to keep their contract and stay on. Last I heard, it seems Nextel had a more successful lawyer than AT&#38;T and the logos can stay for a while but must be off by 2009. And you know with television rights involved, no company is going to pay tens of millions for a car they can&#8217;t have a logo on. I&#8217;ll suggest to AT&#38;T that they decorate Burton&#8217;s car like a giant Apple iPhone minus any AT&#38;T logo. With a five-year exclusive deal to one of the hotter phones on the market, they could really rub it in. Or maybe sponsor the blimp and equip it with a jammer to render Nextel/Sprint phones useless at tracks. And then I&#8217;m going to the local dirt track to watch Mike&#8217;s Muffler and Ernie&#8217;s Excavating duke it out, with at least one of them &#8220;explaining the rules&#8221; to the unenlightened flagman after the race. Click &#34;Visit Site&#34; below to add your insights and opinions.]]></description>
					  <author>grwhale@gmail.com (G. R. Whale)</author>
					  <pubDate>Thu, 18 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400</pubDate>
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					  <title><![CDATA[Future Pickup Trucks]]></title>
					  <link>http://www.turbodieselregister.com/articlelive/articles/64/1/Future-Pickup-Trucks/Page1.html</link>
					  <description><![CDATA[Pickup trucks, which are dear to our hearts, have seen a lot of changes over the years&#8212;or have they? Yes, the engines are more powerful, they can haul more weight faster, and they coddle their passengers with more amenities and electronic do-dads then ever before. But look at a Ford Model T pickup, and you&#8217;ll see the same basic layout, radiator and engine hood out front, followed by a cab and then a cargo bed. Back in the '50s and &#8217;60s several interesting designs were introduced, such as the Jeep FC-150 and 170 series, VW, Ford Econoline and Dodge A-100 van-based pickups, which all had their engine between driver and passenger, along with the rear-engine Corvair pickups. These trucks, which are all defunct, provided exceptional packaging efficiency, fitting a lot in a short overall length. One of the tradeoffs was a reduced crush zone to protect the driver in a frontal crash. Since then there has been very little innovation in the basic pickup truck layout. However, today&#8217;s need to reduce fuel consumption, combined with increased urban congestion and parking problems, call for us to rethink the basic design of current and future pickups. Perhaps with current technology, including better seatbelts, airbags and computer-aided design, occupant protection in a flat-front pickup could be improved, like it is with the tiny Mercedes Smart car. The front could also slope backwards in an aerodynamic shape. What do you think needs to be done, and what would you like the pickup truck of the future to be like?Note:&#160; Click on &#34;Visit Site&#34; below to post your comments.]]></description>
					  <author>kenfreund@yahoo.com (Ken Freund)</author>
					  <pubDate>Fri, 12 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400</pubDate>
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					  <title><![CDATA[Near Misses]]></title>
					  <link>http://www.turbodieselregister.com/articlelive/articles/63/1/Near-Misses/Page1.html</link>
					  <description><![CDATA[I just returned from a media introduction for the Ram 4500 and 550 Chassis Cabs (&#8220;in showrooms now&#8221;) with an assortment of magazines, many of which included an article I&#8217;d contributed. And when I opened one and read about the new GM two-mode hybrid SUV, I started thinking about missed opportunities. Of course I&#8217;d been thinking about at least one missed opportunity all the way from the Ram 45/55 event: more GCWR. TDR members know I&#8217;m not anti-Dodge, and when I feel the need to point out something that could be better I am usually not alone, have the objective numbers to back it up, or both, but part of me thinks Dodge may have missed an opportunity with the Ram 4500/5500 by not increasing GCWR over the pickups more than they did. True, GVWR is up to 16,500 and 19,500 pounds, respectively, these values almost dictated by the class. But Gross Combined is up by &#8220;only&#8221; 2500 pounds over a big Ram pickup, to 26,000 pounds, and since these &#8220;medium-duty heavy-dutys&#8221; appear hefty, real towing capacity doesn&#8217;t seem much improved over the biggest Ram pickups. Many Ram commercial buyers will find the tow rating more than adequate for their welding rig, cow tipper, generator or whatever, yet I know more than a few TDR members that need something more in tow capacity. And I think with Ford and GM both offering GCWR in the 30-33K range for their Class 5s, Dodge had better be working on the brakes, cooling, rear ends, gearboxes, or whatever else is a limiting factor in that 26,000 value. On the other front I&#8217;ve heard that GM will eat some of the cost of the hybrid system on their full-size SUVs, but the story I saw today mentions some of the ways they &#8220;reduced mass&#8221; in these SUVs. These included aluminum hood, tailgate, bumper beams, driveshafts, and wheels, plus taking &#8220;almost 10 pounds&#8221; out of each seat. I&#8217;d like to know how much more the aluminum bits cost relative the standard steel parts and standard aluminum wheels.&#160; And, why didn&#8217;t they do all this in the first place? If you can engineer 10 pounds out of each seat without sacrificing anything, surely the manufacturing costs couldn&#8217;t be more than what you spent on engineering seats for a new vehicle and then reengineering the same seats a year or two later. Do you think all that weight saving on a Tahoe/Yukon hybrid should be standard on every Tahoe, and do you think the Ram 4500/5500 needs a boost in GCWR? Note:&#160; Click on &#34;Visit Site&#34; below to post your comments.]]></description>
					  <author>grwhale@gmail.com (G. R. Whale)</author>
					  <pubDate>Sat, 06 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400</pubDate>
					 <guid isPermaLink="true">http://www.turbodieselregister.com/articlelive/articles/63/1/Near-Misses/Page1.html</guid>
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					  <title><![CDATA[Traffic:  How much worse can it get?]]></title>
					  <link>http://www.turbodieselregister.com/articlelive/articles/62/1/Traffic--How-much-worse-can-it-get/Page1.html</link>
					  <description><![CDATA[I just read that the average American driver wastes nearly an entire work week each year sitting in traffic while commuting. Collectively, we sat in traffic jams for a total of 4.2 billion hours in 2005, up from 4 billion the year before according to Texas Traffic Institute's urban mobility report. That works out to an average of around 38 hours per driver. TTI&#8217;s study (http://mobility.tamu.edu) estimated that we wasted 2.9 billion gallons of fuel while stuck in that traffic. Adding up the lost time, traffic delays cost the nation $78.2 billion, the study also estimated. I&#8217;m sure that doesn&#8217;t include the missed meetings, missed flights and missed business opportunities, nor the stress and road rage it caused. High fuel costs seem to have cut non-essential driving, but not commuting. According to census data about three-quarters of all commuters drive alone. Los Angeles had the worst congestion, delaying drivers an average of 72 hours last year, followed by Atlanta, San Francisco, Washington D.C. and Dallas. Atlanta, which has the second-worst traffic in the U.S., had some surprising improvement. In 2005, drivers there wasted an average of 60 hours in traffic, down from 70 hours a decade prior. However, the population is growing so fast that planners are having a tough time dealing with the increase in traffic. Atlanta gained 890,000 people from 2000 to 2006, more than any other area in the country. The study, which summed it up as &#34;Too many people, too many trips over too short of a time period on a system that is too small,&#34; offers ways to reduce traffic congestion, including more roads or lanes, better public transportation and flexible work schedules, telecommuting and carpools. It seems like the way things are going, there&#8217;s going to be coast-to-coast gridlock. What do you think needs to happen, and how can it be reasonably achieved? ]]></description>
					  <author>kenfreund@yahoo.com (Ken Freund)</author>
					  <pubDate>Tue, 25 Sep 2007 00:00:00 -0400</pubDate>
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