Description

Editor at Large, Arthur St. Antoine, takes us through the road loop and judging process of Motor Trend's 2009 Truck of the Year competition.

Transcript

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.