#Truck

Some of you may be more familiar with this friend of the catering and drinking-water industries in its Chevrolet Step-Van guise, but I’ve always preferred GMC’s name: Value Van! I ran across this fairly complete example in my local self-service wrecking yard, quite close to the Simu-Wood™ LeBaron Town & Country wagon. Me and the Value Van, we have a history!

American-made overhead-cam engines were almost as rare as reliable South Vietnamese presidents in the mid-1960s, so I did a doubletake when I spotted one in a Denver self-service wrecking yard.

You’d think that the zilch-o-torque characteristics of a Wankel engine wouldn’t be so great for hauling heavy loads, and you’d be right! Adding an automatic transmission to the mix, as is the case with this ’75 Mazda pickup, no doubt made for some interesting driving experiences when hauling, say, a dozen sacks of concrete mix in the back.

In my first Denver winter after a driving lifetime in coastal California, I’m now experiencing my first real taste of driving in snow. My ’92 Civic is doing pretty well (i.e., I haven’t crashed or become stuck yet), but I’m starting to eyeball Craigslist listings for IHC Scouts and FJ40 Land Cruisers. After spotting this Toyota in my neighborhood, I may have to forget about the Scouts.

After 45 years of work, it’s time for this 1965 F-100’s steel to return to the foundry. Will it be reborn as a shiny new F-150… or as a FAW Tianjin Weizhi?

Here’s a totally practical daily driver I spotted on the south side of Denver a while back.

When Raoul Duke, protagonist of Hunter S. Thompson’s best-known work, goes to cover the story of the ’71 Mint 400 race, he attempts to observe the race from a Ford-owned truck. When I saw this ’72 at a Denver wrecking yard a few days ago, I figured I might be looking at that very same truck!

I’ve been seeing quite a few junked Datsun pickups in recent years, and most of them have featured the King Cab option. To those of you accustomed to 21st-century pickups with four doors and luxurious back seats, the few additional cubic centimeters of the Datsun 720’s King Cab must seem a cruel joke.

It would be difficult to conceive of a vehicle better-suited to demonstrating TTAC’s diversity of automotive reviewers than the massive and massively outrageous Ford Raptor. Robert Farago would have eviscerated it with a zero-star diatribe on the inadvisability of building three-ton boutique trucks with borrowed funds. Sajeev Mehta would rhapsodize about the graphics but demonize the chunky controls. Daniel Stern might be have complained about the lighting system. As fate would have it, however, I’m the fellow who got the Raptor to review. So I took it mudding.

Despite looking at a half-sized Q1 production plan, GM says it will bump truck production in the month of March. Production will be restored and escalated in March at GM’s Flint and Arlington truck plants, meaning there will be more Silverado, Sierra, Tahoe, Yukon and Escalade models. So, uh, why? “As far as our 2008 and 2009 mix goes, we’re significantly down on 2008 models, where most of our competitors have a lot of 2008 to get rid of. So anticipating a spring selling season, we’d like to increase our 2009 inventory,” GM’s Pete Ternes tells Automotive News [sub]. GM’s truck inventory has dropped noticeably, from a 122-day supply on December 1. But with 90 days of light truck supply, there’s still no real reason to increase production. Most industry-watchers consider a 60-day supply ideal. So what’s up?