2009 Motor Trend Truck of the Year - Road Loop and Judging
Arthur St. Antoine: Now its time for the next phase of our 20009 Motor Trend Truck
of the Year competition, the real world, each editor will drive each
vehicle on a roughly 20 mile loop and it includes highway driving,
city driving and mountain driving. They’ll be assessing things like
passing, steering, braking, acceleration, in general how truck
drivers drive these vehicles in the real world.
Now is the final phase in our competition, we have numbers from
the test track, we have impressions from the off road driving loop
and we have a day of driving this vehicles in the real world. But
now each of our eight editors has assembled in a hotel conference
room to begin the deliberations where they’ll share notes, test track
numbers, overall impressions and at the end will arrive at the 2009
Motor Trend Truck of the Year.
Male: Hey thanks for your effort over the last couple of days. Now we’re
down at crunch time. I think we’ll start the discussion the opposite
end of the alphabet, the Suzuki Equator through the Hummer
because I think there’ll be a lot of discussion around the Ford F150
and the Dodge Ram.
Male: And we’ve all become kind of accustomed to whether he knew a
truck comes out, it’s new. And this one, when would that Frontier
arrive? I mean it's kind of old texts so we’re not dazzled by
improve structural rigidity or improved engine refined or any of
that act kind of -- I'm not going to use the lipstick analogy but you
know.
Male: We’ll get back to the criteria, and one of the criteria’s superiority,
the engineering excellence, the advancement in design, at least
someone else has tried. It kind of falls flat to me in that, I guess
that criteria in particular.
The Hummer H3T seems like another marketing guy’s idea of a
pick-up truck. In some ways to me this is almost like a caricature,
almost like a clown truck. It's all about style and I’m with the
substance on this one, bits fell of, both of them.
Arthur St. Antoine: The base -- because I like the five speed although it’s actually a
pretty good transmission. And you don’t hear the wheezing
engines so much when you blasting over the sand. It's fun to toss
around -- the nose felt a little bit lighter under the wheel. I enjoyed
that one but ridiculous vehicle I own, I mean as you say, you put
some stuff on that, much less an off-road hill. You're going to be
struggling the whole way if it’s loaded down as it could be.
Male: To me the F-150 it’s like our version of a German sedan that’s
over engineered except they still have three valve engines and a
two valve engine which barely is more powerful than the Dodge
Ram V6 and the big problem with that, I have a problem with the
variant -- I think the variations they have on this truck had just
gone out of control and certainly against where the market is
heading right now.
Arthur St. Antoine: I was very impressed with the refinement of the Fords I thought it
was quiet and it was excellent, created a little wind noise. The
bigger V8 was pretty refined. I like their transmission and a great
cabin. I mean that rear seat is something spectacular, the one
feature in this competition to me that really jumped out was that
rear Ford seat. You just flip it up with one hand, stays up, we bring
it down one quick latch and you got a tremendous amount of room
in that cabin. It lifts up, very, very impressive feature I thought,
very useful.
Male: So let’s have a look at the Ram in detail. I mean this was perhaps
now quite as comprehensive a rework of the existing hardware as
the Ford but a nice piece of design, a very aggressive design. The
Chrysler people tell you that they talked to their owners, they’ve
delivered the truck based on that owner feedback so the close
spring rear end, a big departure for that sort of truck and it's going
to cause a lot of controversy in the truck circles. A focus on ride on
road ride and unladed ride rather than the absolute towing which
ford regards as king. So it's a different approach to the personal use
element of a pick up truck.
Arthur St. Antoine: There was a lot -- I must admit that I like about the Dodge. I the
Hemi engine obviously is wonderful. I like that way it looks. They
did a great job with front end and you know some of those little
box elements in the rear that you can open from your exterior and
put stuff in, pretty clever design, I mean a lot of people are going
to use that.
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