Turbo Diesel Register

For months people have been speculating on the “new” Ram for 2009. Chrysler wouldn’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 “North American International” makes me think it’s a stupid name).

There’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…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’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 “new management” at Chrysler hasn’t been in place that long, so we’ll have to wait and see. If I told you everything I know I’d be unemployed.

Spies report the new Ram has coil springs, trailing arms and a Panhard rod in back, like some 1970’s pickups and modern “stock” cars. This wouldn’t surprise me because you can get a good ride, payload won’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’ve been really neat.

I had heard the Ram had a sloped forward grille - again a throwback to the ’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 “dated” these days because they’re not being used as tools and farm implements, they’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’ll never know because Executive Peon dismissals don’t merit press releases. Others think viral marketing and it was all planned. Conspiracy TDR theorists will say it’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’t answer positively to all those questions better let Dodge know ASAP so they get the HD version right.

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’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, “avoidable contact” (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’s cheap. In “world championship” Formula One, this summer’s brouhaha over Ferrari engineering documentation in a Maclaren employee’s possession resulted in, the Maclaren team out $100 million and all manufacturer points (the drivers are still in it) 2008. I’m guessing Max Mosley or Bernie Ecclestone, the power and money men behind F1, needed a new yacht.

Here’s NASCAR’s money problem this year, decided in court and not on track:

Cingular (partly owned by AT&T at the time) coughed up $150 mil to sponsor the #31 car starting in 2001. When AT&T expanded and bought up what it didn’t own of Cingular, it wished to change the logos to reflect the AT&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’t help that most surveys from the first half of 2007 found Nextel/Sprint ranked well-behind leaders Verizon and AT&T in terms of revenue, subscribers, added subscribers per quarter (what Wall Street likes), or customer service. This was Nextel/Sprint’s best chance to get AT&T out of the NASCAR picture(s).

Personally, I think since AT&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&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’t have a logo on.

I’ll suggest to AT&T that they decorate Burton’s car like a giant Apple iPhone minus any AT&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’m going to the local dirt track to watch Mike’s Muffler and Ernie’s Excavating duke it out, with at least one of them “explaining the rules” to the unenlightened flagman after the race.

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I just returned from a media introduction for the Ram 4500 and 550 Chassis Cabs (“in showrooms now”) with an assortment of magazines, many of which included an article I’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’d been thinking about at least one missed opportunity all the way from the Ram 45/55 event: more GCWR. TDR members know I’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 “only” 2500 pounds over a big Ram pickup, to 26,000 pounds, and since these “medium-duty heavy-dutys” appear hefty, real towing capacity doesn’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’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 “reduced mass” in these SUVs. These included aluminum hood, tailgate, bumper beams, driveshafts, and wheels, plus taking “almost 10 pounds” out of each seat.

I’d like to know how much more the aluminum bits cost relative the standard steel parts and standard aluminum wheels. And, why didn’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’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?

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Lacking the business acumen of big-buck bankers I never saw it coming: Cerberus announced August 5 that Robert Nardelli would be the CEO of the newly solo Chrysler Corporation. And I’m not the only one. Analyst John Casesa of Casesa Shapiro wrote in Automotive News (8/6/07) a piece titled, “Look for a hard-nosed Chrysler board” and referenced “the presumed chairman, former Chrysler COO Wolfgang Bernhard.” Yes, John Casesa was wrong too.

Bernhard, who’s been bounced around the top ranks of some sizable automakers the last few years, clearly has that “hard-nosed” air. Dodge is an –in-your-face car company and Bernhard’s an in-your-face kind of guy. What other car exec would ride into a major auto show on a Viper-powered motorcycle?

Nardelli comes most recently from nuts-and-bolts…CEO of the Home Depot. I consider Home Depot a retailer. In the car biz retailer has another name: Dealer. Chrysler needs to come up with the good product--cars like the 300, PT Cruiser and the Jeep JT “concept” –for the dealers to sell. Can Nardelli do that?

At Home Depot Nardelli doubled revenue in six years, much of it by opening more stores. More stores is something Chrysler doesn’t need. Home Depot didn’t have $19 billion in pension/retirement costs nor as many competitors either.

But Nardelli, who gets a rumored salary of a buck a year, wasn’t liked by Home Depot shareholders. Money books put last year’s earnings at $38 million and he would not answer questions at a May 2006 meeting. He was gone in January 2007 with a severance package that was a little over 210 million dollars and the stock price was no higher than when he started. In the words of an acquaintance, “the guy’s a crook. Anybody who takes that much away on essentially no investor return is a crook.”

So depending on your point of view, Chrysler has a crook or a savior running it. After last year’s loss of 680 million, give or take, the investors probably won’t give Nardelli more than a year to fix it. And the car biz runs considerably more lead time than new bricks and pipe.

Most recent Chrysler CEO Tom LaSorda is bumped to President and Vice Chairman but playing nice; hopefully his “turnaround” plan to make Chrysler profitable again in 2008 will work and he’ll get credit. Chrysler COO Eric Ridenour is leaving, no reason given.

Nardelli was quoted on a finance web page as “excited to be part of a team focused on re-establishing Chrysler as a standalone industry leader, with a renewed focus on meeting the needs of the customer.” Since customer satisfaction went through the floor while he was cutting costs at Home Depot I’m not holding my breath.

But if he and LaSorda can get Bernhard back as the head product guy (like GM’s Bob Lutz, just younger) they have a chance.

We all know everybody does bad things to and with their truck…it’s the All-American nature of pickups. What helps the TDR far more than you might imagine is the lack of a double standard. You know it better by this statement: “I am my own warranty station.”

One of the first magazines I worked for had standards and laid it out plain: When we accidentally overloaded something, as when I put a GM dually 64 pounds over GVWR with a camper (intending to break something, and we did), we printed it. And if a smooth-idling, normally-aspirated small-block made 600+ hp on straight gasoline on the dyno, I was happy to add “once” and acknowledge what else happened on the dyno. And some readers called and continued asking questions until they heard the answer they wanted to hear…wonder if they’re still on hold.

A few trailers later in life I worked for a magazine that had double standards. We didn’t test anything overweight, but if the boss liked you he’d put your 1,100-pounds-over-GVWR camper/truck combo on their TV show. If your full-time 35-foot fifth-wheel carried only 600 pounds of payload, and you were friends of Mr. Editor, you and you alone were allowed to add a comment that it would carry 400 pounds more if the water tank contained only 20 gallons. The double standard kept me from adding, “so would every other trailer.” Ask about overloading and the reply was “everybody does it”—indeed, Mr. Editor claimed the weight of his own Dodge/camper rig at 1,000-1,500 pounds over GVWR.

When I asked about getting a proper driver’s license, the reply was “You’re not going to get stopped, everybody does it.” So we’ll continue to test truck/trailer rigs we’re not legally licensed to drive, as will two of the contributors who are both ex-law enforcement and didn’t know the rules until we told them. But their double standard maintains you should have the appropriate license and/or endorsements.
Other powerful advertisers had their own double standard, as we would use their numbers for performance part(s) evaluations. Although Mr. Editor. would steadfastly maintain that we weren’t just gonna use their numbers, I more than once had to point out “You just did.”

So far I’ve avoided that with the TDR. I hope it stays that way.