Maxidyne

Another toy for the children to tip over...

Probably because the profit margins are too slim in on-highway diesels.

Not fast enough to compete with air, too expensive to compete with rail or ship.

IIRC there are something like 8 GMC truck only dealers left, and they damn well deserve first shot at any new models.

There's an incredible disconnect here between GM and Ford's business plan and reality... The only way to build an electric car at a near competitive price is to make it a subcompact, otherwise the expensive battery pack needed becomes too big and expensive to be viable in the market. The market wants bigger SUVs and huge pickups, and they're not going to give them up for a subcompact like the Bolt!

Are Ford and GM in a suicide pact?

I suspect the Cruze/Volt platform went to Peugeot with the Euro car biz, so those models have been on borrowed time. For years the Impala has suffered from being confused with the too similar Malibu, but if one has to die, the Impala with it's more upmarket image and heritage should be saved. That leaves GM with the Korean designed subcompacts and Bolt electics, the forgettable Malibu, the Isuzu designed compact pickups, the domestic 'cept for the Isuzu diesel V8 pickups, the Isuzu cabovers, the Camaro, legacy full size van, Nissan minivan, and the the Vette...

Volvo doesn't design these new trucks for us, they design them for the big fleets that get a $150K truck for $100K, take an immediate chapter 179 depreciation tax credit, run the wheels off it, then sell it before the warranty runs out. Good luck to the second and further owners...

I spent my whole career as a company driver, a few times when I was bummed with the job or laid off I looked into buying my own truck, even went truck shopping a few times. But I'd do the numbers and I was making better money as a company driver, so I put up with the Freightliners and worse... But got to drive Macks mostly for the last half of my driving career.

The difference is the new truck is under warranty so the manufacturer will pay for repairs (unless you 'fess up to the ether ODing). When you're running old trucks, you need to include in your business plan how you're going to handle multiple catastrophes...

If money is tight, what are you going to do if they find the crank or turbo needs replacing too? What if the transmission goes a week after you get the engine rebuilt?

I agree with 41 Chevy, make a good honest assessment of the condition of the truck. A 14 year old truck like yours will sell for about the cost of a rebuild, so unless the truck is in excellent condition it might be best to part it out.

Might that tank be for an air starter? Looks bigger than the usual air brake system tanks, and looks like the big outlet hose the air starters used coming out the front of the tank.

If you don't know the dangers of ether, you shouldn't own a big truck. Or even a VW diesel.

Send a 100 HP tractor to do a job that wouldn't even challenge a 20 HP tractor and it'll tend to use fuel like a 100 HP tractor. That's 'cause a lot of the fuel a tractor uses is just to pull it's weight around, never mind do any work. My tractor is rated for 10 KW at the PTO, and I rarely use those 10 KW. You could double that 10 KW I'm not even using all of and the driveway won't get plowed any faster, if I want to plow the driveway faster it'd make more sense to get a wider bucket or better yet a plow instead of more HP. Same with cars and trucks- If you really need the ability to haul a ton, get a 3/4 or 1 ton pickup or better yet a flatbed. If not, you're just burning gas and $$$ to drag around a lot of dead weight and wind resistance.

Per the EPA's own documents, this is primarily a California problem: link here. No point in making the rest of the country suffer.

It's great that they'll go 300k miles. Problem is, they'll burn $60,000 worth of gas doing it... A lot of people talk down the new aero trucks and smaller engines and 6 by 2 axle setups. The traditional trucks they prefer like a long nose axle forward KW or Pete maybe get 6 MPG on a good day. But there's a guy hauling a milk tanker around here, 80k GCW and loaded 62% of the time, and he'd getting 9 MPG. His truck is a Mack Anthem with the 13 liter 445 HP turbo compounded engine, 12 speed automated manual Mack transmission, and 6 by 2 drive with adaptive loading. He's saving $15,000+ a year on fuel, so even if he gets stuck or hits a deer he's still ahead...

They'll make it 300k miles and more, but at what cost? Full size pickups are money pits, starting with their bloated purchase price and continuing with every tire replacement and gas fill-up.

Has GM learned nothing from their recent near death experience?

Not so much that but the practice of hiring engineers for a project and then laying them off... Met a few auto engineers at a tech day last year, one of them had in the few years since college worked for Navistar, Polaris, and Arctic Cat and another had similar experience in the industry. The one that was only a couple years out of college was looking for jobs outside the industry, the other one was around 60 and after a couple years in the medical device industry was about to give up and retire early. The third engineer had worked for Cummins for years and was likely to stay 'til retirement...

A lot of people in the U.S. miss this... Simply by having populations of over a billion each, China and India once they fully industrialize will have the world's largest economies.

Agreed on the Big 3 diesel pickup makers dirty little secret, the "cab lift". I remember back in the 60s when both Ford with the N series and GM with their similar short BBC conventional jammed DD 6-71s and Cummins NTCs under those cabs, making a labor intensive "cab lift" needed to perform an inframe rebuild. As a result many of those trucks were run to death rather than rebuilt and Ford and GM's reputation suffered. Both GM and Ford solved this problem with their later tilt hood short conventionals, bit it's amazing that the same design mistake was repeated decades later. Then again, the way the Big 3 have downsized out veteran engineers over the last few decades, it's no surprise...

Ford's new unit body longitudinal engine platform will probably be available in several guises- 2 and 4 door Mustangs, Explorers, a return of the AU Falcon, and maybe a Ute version too. This platform has a lot of potential- The Michigan State Patrol tested the upcoming Explorer Interceptor and it outperformed the competition's sedans as well as SUVs, and the only thing faster was the Taurus Interceptor.

When you've got a valuable brand, you expand it. One of the auto industries better writers, Peter DeLorenzo over at his autoextremist blog has long argued that GM should make Corvette a brand and put all their high performance vehicles under it.

There's nothing stopping VW from acquiring 20% of Ford, but the way the Ford corporate structure is set up the Ford family controls the majority of the votes even though they have only a minority of the stock. As for VW adding capacity in the U.S., Chattanooga has 2 "lines" and each could make 200,000+ plus units a year. Neither the Passat line nor the Atlas line are building even half that, so VW has no need for another U.S. plant. What VW Chattanooga could do for Ford is provide an assembly home for the Focus and/or Fusion or simply Ford branded Passats. But another U.S. plant? Diess may just be blowing smoke to curry favor with the Trump administration...