Comparison Tests
Proposition: No vehicle offers a broader range of capabilities than a full-size pickup truck with four doors. Seating for five. Covered cargo space for stuff you want to keep locked up and dry. Open cargo space for really big stuff and stuff you don’t want inside there with you, to wit: dead deer, live badgers, bags of organic fertilizer. Big load capacity. Big towing capability.
Unless you want to shell out the substantial premium you’d pay for a hybrid, which might get you a few extra mpg, that’s the price of big-truck capabilities. Fuel and air equal power. Big loads require big power.
Some members of Congress seem to believe they can legislate big mpg gains in big pickups without serious performance penalties. But like the California Air Resources Board and its attempt to mandate zero-emissions vehicles, they’re out of touch with technical realities.
In any case, reductions in fuel consumption occur automatically, as a function of price. When gasoline prices hovered around $4 per gallon, pickup inventories reached overflow levels on dealer lots around the country, a glut exacerbated by the implosion of the U.S. housing market and subsequent general economic malaise. There’s a direct correlation between the health of the housing industry and pickup sales, a correlation that Ford’s economic tea-leaf readers see as dismal for at least the next two years. Others see this forecast as optimistic.
Meanwhile, domestic truckmakers have been tiptoeing along the edge of a financial abyss, and corporate execs are muttering the Twenty-third Psalm. The shadows are deep, the valley is more like a chasm, and at this writing, the only ray of light is gasoline prices that have dropped precipitously from their summer highs to well below $2 per gallon.
Actually, there are some other bright spots in the gloom. These are provided by the trucks themselves, which are stronger, tougher, and more refined. In particular, we’re talking about pickups with good ol’ Yankee names: Chevrolet Silverado, Dodge Ram, and Ford F-150, the subjects of this comparison test.
Some of you may protest that this is no longer an all-American show—that the big-pickup game includes a couple of teams from Japan. Before you grab your BlackBerry to thumb us an indignant “whasamatta with you?,” let’s review our selection procedure. The champ from the most recent comparo is seeded in automatically. Beyond that, we include new or significantly updated entries that have come along since.
The last showdown, “Pay Dirt,” appeared in our April 2007 issue. The then-new Silverado emerged as the winner, trailed by the Nissan Titan, the Toyota Tundra, the Ram, and the F-150. Since then, the Ram and the F-150 have had major redesigns, while the Tundra and the Titan stand pat for 2009.
To escape the onset of wintry weather—not to mention the gloom that hovers around Detroit these days—we sought a warmer clime for our test. And what better destination for truckin’ than Texas? According to a statistical snapshot by the Vehicle Titles and Registration section of the Texas Department of Transportation, on October 13, 2008, there were 5,540,227 pickups registered in Texas, almost 27 percent of vehicle registrations statewide.
We collected our trucks—all of them fancy (and pricey) editions—in Dallas and headed for the central Texas Hill Country west of Austin, setting up headquarters in Fredericksburg (population: 10,432), an attractive town founded by German immigrants in the mid-1800s. In addition to friendly eateries and an unhurried pace, it has the attraction of being close to Luckenbach (permanent population: 1), glorified in a song by the late Waylon Jennings and home to frequent country-music festivals.
While in the Luckenbach neighborhood, we visited the ranch of Mary Beth Richardson, who keeps a trio of Texas longhorns in her front yard. Thanks to Richardson’s bribes (feed), the longhorns cooperated and refrained from puncturing either trucks or test crew. Photo ops wrapped, we saddled up to see which truck would be tops.
