Keep On Truckin'

Nobody asked me but . . .

In just its third season of NASCAR racing in the Craftsman Truck Racing Series, with 14 of the 25 races having been run in the 2006 season, Toyota sits atop the manufacturer standings with seven wins to next-best Ford with four. And Toyota drivers Todd Bodine, David Reutimann and Johnny Benson are one, two, three in the driver points standings.

So, whatcha thunk?

Is it fair to have a “for-in” auto manufacturer, with headquarters in Japan, no less, racin’ for greenbacks and glory against our good ol’ boy dough-mess-tic auto companies outta Deetroit?

Next year Tie-oda is movin’ up the ladda to the Nextel Cup with a racin’ version of the Camry. This ain’t hearsay. But is it heresy? Is Bill France, Jr. and Company buckin’ tradition and sellin’ out to Japanese yen? Should the Nextel Cup exclude forriners. Or do most consider Tie-oda a dough-mess-tic company these days?

Heck, they got plenty of manufacturing plants in the U.S. of A., including an all-new truck plant in Texas. Does that count for anything? Or nuthin?

Are them racers from North Carolina, Alabama and other far flung places in the Southeast—and the rest of the country these days—sellin’ their souls to the Tie-oda devil? Or are they simply recognizin’ the times they be a changing?

I’d shore like to know whatcha thunkin.

Sin-seer-lee, Billy Bob Mudgeon

2006 Honda Ridgeline

Nobody asked me but . . .

Honda is a late-comer to the pickup ranks and, Honda being Honda, it’s no surprise that the 2006 Ridgeline is as different in the truck segment as the Acura RL is in the luxury car market.

During the past 15 years light-duty pickups have evolved from work trucks into family lifestyle vehicles, used for everyday driving and recreational activities. And it is this buyer the Ridgeline hopes to appeal to with its emphasis on safety, comfort, handling and utility.

So let’s start by putting the Ridgeline into perspective. The midsize Dodge Dakota is about a foot longer in wheelbase and overall length. The new Toyota Tacoma, a “large” compact truck is about the same length overall. Inside, all three are close in head and shoulder room but the Ridgeline enjoys a considerable advantage in hip and shoulder room, resulting from a significantly wider track and 3–6 inches greater width.
Prices start at $27,700 (plus $515 destination charges) for the base but very well equipped RT model. Order “everything” and the $34,640 RTL comes equipped with leather seating, HomeLink, heated front seats, power moonroof, XM satellite radio and a navigation system.

A typical body-on-frame truck with a live rear axle suffers in the areas of structural rigidity and ride. With a unit body combined with an integral ladder frame and independent rear suspension, the only pickup on the market with IRS, the wide-track Ridgeline handles and rides more like an elevated, oversize Accord than a typical pickup truck.

The Ridgeline features a tailgate that can drop down conventionally or swing out from the side for better access to cargo or to what is probably the Ridgeline’s most innovative feature: a weather-tight storage compartment integrated into the floor of the bed that’s large enough to hold a 72-quart cooler or three golf bags.

Step up into the Ridgeline’s spacious interior and you’ll find Accord-like comfort, convenience and safety: Front, side and side head curtain airbags plus traction control and vehicle stability control are standard in all models. In addition, it’s the first four-door pickup to earn the government’s highest crash test safety rating, five stars for both frontal and side impact crash test performance from the NHTSA.

Powering all versions of the Ridgeline is a 3.5-liter 255-horsepower V-6 mated to a five-speed automatic and Honda’s Variable Torque Management (VTM) all-wheel drive. Like most Honda engines this one bristles with technology but lacks low-rpm pulling power. There’s adequate torque, but it peaks at a rather high 4,500 rpm. Honda says the Ridgeline can tow 5,000 pounds, but if I were going to use a pickup to haul a load that heavy, I’d look for a truck with a V-8. EPA estimated fuel economy is 16 mpg city and 21 mpg highway, but those numbers don’t consider hauling heavy loads or going deep in the throttle a lot of the time.

Flexible in character but not in structure, exceptionally comfortable and well equipped, the Ridgeline fuses the capabilities of a truck, including towing, hauling and off-roading, with traditional Honda strengths such as high resale value, fun-to-drive performance, and exceptional durability, high quality, and reliability, along with industry-leading safety. All it needs is a bit more bottom-end grunt.

Pro (and con) logue
Ridgeline sales have not reached Honda’s expectations. So what’s the problem? Honda isn’t thought of as a truck manufacturer? No V8? Too expensive?

Truck . . . or not a truck!

The Carmudgeon’s inquisitive mind would appreciate your thougths.

Lessons Learned from Racing

Nobody asked me but . . .

The cheapest money GM spends every year is the budget for the two Corvettes racing in the ALMS. Don’t get me wrong. It costs GM millions (I hear upwards of $50 million) to compete in the ALMS, but compared to the hundreds of millions the company pisses away every day on a stock value that is in the dumpster, “paper” that is rated in the junk category by Wall Street, recalls, bloated executive salaries, poor quality, unfocused (I’m being kind here.) product and a myriad of other issues, racing is downright bargain basement cheap.

I’ll give you an example of what I mean. A few weeks ago I was at the ALMS race in Mid-Ohio. During the Saturday morning practice session one of the Aston Martin DBR9s that competes against the Corvettes was hustling down one of the fastest sections of Mid-Ohio real estate when a brake proportioning problem caused the car to suddenly swap ends.

The Aston driver, Pedro Lamy, exited the track on the outside of the turn where a bit of banking can launch a car. The car traveled perfectly backward as it flew off the track a distance of 142 feet at about three feet in the air. His flight—a track record for both altitude and duration for the Mid-Ohio track—was apropos for Ohio, the state that bills itself as First in Flight in honor of Orville and Wilbur Wright whose Dayton-based bicycle shop was the birthplace of the Wright Flyer.

Lamy was extremely lucky. Had the car been “flying” at even a slight yaw angle it would have rolled itself into a tight little ball of British aluminium (Yes, that is the correct spelling!) and carbon fiber as it landed in one of Mid-Ohio’s dreaded gravel pits. When the car landed, it bounced once and then slid into a tire wall at high speed.

Lamy was uninjured, but the Aston’s rear and under carriage were not as lucky. The wounded Aston was trucked back to the pits and unloaded. Immediately, a horde of Aston engineers and mechanics were all over the car, assessing damage, unbolting body panels and the various aero under trays and removing what looked to be a 100 pounds or so of Mid-Ohio grass and gravel. In less than three hours the car had to be ready for qualifying.

It was. With what seemed like practiced clockwork precision the damaged bits and pieces were repaired or replaced. It wasn’t perfect, but give full marks to the boys behind the wrenches and the boys behind the wheel, Lamy and co-driver Stephane Sarrazin, who put in a time only 0.184 seconds slower than their teammates for third on the GT1 grid.

This Astontatious digression now returns to Corvette and General Motors. If you want to win races, you have to be able to think on your feet, make instant decisions, fix things when the right parts aren’t available, overcome adversity at every turn, and not infrequently, forego food and sleep.

Of course it helps if you start with the right preparation, and if you’ve followed the success of the C5R and the C6R Corvettes, you know that Corvette Racing has competed in 69 races since the team's debut at Daytona on Feb. 5, 1999. As of May 21, 2006, the team has scored 48 victories and 33 1-2 finishes. Corvette Racing has won the ALMS manufacturers and team championships five consecutive years. Included in those 48 wins are an overall win in the 2001 Daytona 24-hour and four class wins in the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

It’s taken a great deal of blood, sweat and tears from the folks at Pratt &Miller and General Motors who design and build the cars. Plus great driving and great wrench and pit work and great timing and scoring to be that successful. “Team” and “work” would be an appropriate two-word descriptor that is usually written as “teamwork.”

So, GM, if you can build such fast, reliable race cars, why can’t you take what you’ve learned on the race track and apply these same lessons to the less-than-great production cars you are designing and building these days? Success on the race track is not equating to “wins” in the showroom. Ironically, some of your production car engineers are the very same folks who help design your winning race cars. Start populating every level of GM with these “won’t quit” engineers and executives and you’ll transform the organization overnight.

But my question to GM is this: Do you have the will to win?

Who Really Killed the GM EV1?

Nobody asked me but . . .

I’m not a General Motors apologist. They haven’t done a lot right recently. But in the interests of fair and objective reporting, the heat the company is currently (pun intended) taking regarding the EV1 electric car in the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? is far from unbiased.

I haven’t seen the movie. Yet. But I was in NYC recently and some friends I work with had. I’m the car guy in this group. They live in Manhattan and most of them don’t own cars. We all agree that “Green” is good. But their view of GM being the Bad Guy here is a result of technical innocence and naiveté on their part, not some vested interest in hitting the big bad GM automotive bureaucracy when it is seriously down.

The reality of the electric car? It’s the answer to the question no one ever posed.

Suppose you came into my car dealership (It’s called Carmudgen Motors and we have a toll-free 800 number: 800 366-8225, which is easier to remember if you use 800 DON’T CALL!) looking for a new car. And suppose I asked you if you’d be interested in the following vehicle: You could drive it for 75-150 miles on a good day before it would have to be plugged into a special home charger, which was about 1.5 feet by 2 feet by 5 feet. It was essentially the size and shape of a gasoline pump.

The electricity the car ran on was produced by batteries that were still in the advanced prototype stage, and I couldn’t tell you exactly how long they would last, but I could guarantee that they would be very expensive to replace.

I’m a damn good car salesman so you might have missed it when, in the paragraph two before this one, I used the expression “on a good day” to describe the car’s range. The Gen 1 batteries got 55-95 miles per charge. Later batteries upped the range to 75-150 miles. Recharging took as much as eight hours for a full charge (although one could get an 80 percent charge in two to three hours. But on a bad day—say a late January day in Michigan or a mid-August day in Washington DC—and that range could easily be halved.

Why? Batteries run down more rapidly the harder you accelerate. Batteries also lose juice when it gets cold. The colder the cold, the lower the juice. And consider the next problem. The EV1 didn’t have a cooling system. Didn’t need one. And where do you suppose the hot air comes from when you crank your gasoline engine over on a cold day and switch on the heater? Riiiiiiiiight! From the coolant circulating through the engine.

So what did the EV1 have instead? Think heat pump. A solution quite a bit less efficient than a conventional cooling system and much slower to provide “heat.” But the EV1 also had a heated steering wheel and seats. And guess where the electricity for heating your hands and your tushy came from? Right, again. From the batteries. And what do you suppose happens to the EV1’s range when some of the charge is diverted to keeping you comfortable?

Spool forward six months to that muggy DC day, temperatures and the humidity hovering in the high 90s. How long do you think that heat pump, now functioning as an air conditioning system, will require to cool the interior of your EV1 to the same level as your wife’s minivan? Er, try never. It just won’t happen. And what is the one thing every American driver demands from his car’s air conditioning system? Right, once again. Instant cool down. Not measured in minutes, but in seconds. Not gonna happen with the EV1.

I guarantee that if our elected officials in Washington DC had been required to drive nothing but EV1s for a year, they would have either quit their jobs (highly unlikely) or they would have seen to it that electric vehicles were legislated or regulated out of existence.

Don’t believe this would happen? We have history here. Remember seatbelt interlocks? Our friends in Washington legislated them into law because most drivers refused to buckle their safety belts. So for a couple of years we had cars that couldn’t be started unless the belts were latched. What a disaster. This solution led to disillusion and frustration by the very people who had passed the interlock law in the first place. And guess what? They undid it, replacing it with automatic belts (Let’s all hear it for the motorized mouse running around the door frame.) and eventually airbags. All because drivers refused to buckle up.

Did I also tell you that the EV1 was strictly a small 2-seat commuter car? Soccer moms and families consisting of more than two consenting adults need not apply.

GM was totally up front in telling “buyers” the EV1 was for “lease only.” It was a way for the company to learn something about all this new technology while also maintaining control of the hardware and software.

And the liability issue is real. Who’s the first name on a lawsuit if your EV1 needs replacement batteries and the companies that built the originals have stopped production?

Until there is a breakthrough in battery technology that allows an auto maker to create an electric vehicle that is as seamless to drive and to refuel as the vehicles consumers currently purchase, the electric vehicle is doomed to a very limited audience of committed Greenies. And there ain’t enough of them for any company to make a serious business case.

I consider those who remain convinced that there is a conspiracy in play here the modern-day equivalents of consumer advocates who believed that the car companies had a 200-mpg carburetor hidden on a high dusty shelf in the fuel systems lab that never saw the light of day because of collusion among the car companies, the oil cartel and the politicians in Washington “owned” by the oil companies.

So, GM, I’m backing you 95 percent in this one with 5 points lost for the fumble out of bounds (no change of possession) by the running back from PRU during his run down the sidelines following the handoff of the EV1 from the quarterback from GM Tech.

GM deserves high marks for putting its technology into, and its corporate face onto, the EV1. Unfortunately, for the biased minority, this is a classic example of the adage: No good deed goes unpunished.