Specs? Short wheelbase, short bed. Straight 6-cylinder 235 cubic inch engine hooked to a 3-on-the-tree. About 80 horsepower. Single-barrel carb. The only way you could tell it had a spring suspension was to get down there and look. It used stiff multi-leaves all around, and a new set of shocks immediately snapped both fatigued upper shock mounts right off the frame. Some creative work by a local welding shop fixed that, though it took two tries. I recall suspension travel being a good three inches - theoretically.
Biggest problem? Remember how you used to jump up and down on your spring mattress as a kid? Coming up the four-lane doing 55 every day, the slight pavement undulations never noticeable in any other vehicle were amplified by the stiff suspension and a coil spring bench seat that was spectacularly bouncy. Hardly a day went by that my head didn’t hit the ceiling, and that’s with enough static headroom to allow Abe Lincoln to wear his top hat. Naturally, with ordinary points and plugs and a penchant for inhaling oil, it wasn’t a pure joy to keep it firing. It wanted plugs every 1,000 miles.
But it was great fun to drive. It steered fine and had good brakes. Though it was plenty slow getting up to any speed, it had enough torque even at idle to pull tree stumps out of the ground. Throw something in the bed, hang your elbow out the window on a sunny day, and the world seemed right. Even with heavy cargo, you couldn’t notice much difference in pickup. As with all older cars, open side windows meant superb air circulation without a hint of buffeting. The thing flat worked, and had a feel like a comfortable old shoe. When life intervened and I had to suddenly get serious transportation, I sold it to a guy who promised he’d take care of it.
When I much later special-ordered the first new body series that Dodge had made in decades, I ordered a farm truck just like the GMC had been, right down to the green color. It too is a short-wheelbase 239 cubic inch model with rubber matting instead of carpet. For actual daily use, I can’t tell you how much easier rubber flooring is to live with. The suspension is well-controlled yet very smooth. Of course, the engine is a 175 horsepower fuel injected V-6 with a 5-speed trans, connected together by a huge 11-inch clutch. It has A/C, a block heater, a cargo bed light, and a rear bumper as its only options. What I was not allowed to order on this model was a tachometer, limited-slip diff, or any axle ratio other than a pathetic 2.7/1. Someone at Dodge had decided that the Work Special V-6 would be both the new RAM’s fuel ratings leader, and the most pointless vehicle on the planet. A cab, a bed, and an inability to haul anything but hay bales. The powertrain gives it a commendable 20-22MPG (when new), but renders it nearly unusable for actual work.
It is “fast” in that once launched, it can get rolling from a toll booth in quick order. Once up on the cam, it can blow the doors off the old GMC. But load 1,200 pounds of rocks into the bed and try to walk it through a rocky, muddy creek bed, and its faults bristle like Mike Ditka in ballet class. To get all that spunky horsepower, they put a power-stoking cam in it with enough duration to force it to misfire/backfire under any load near idle. Anywhere under 1500 RPM is instant trouble, since you’ll have a great deal of trouble getting it back up again. And once stalled, it has trouble restarting and clearing its plugs. Once restarted, you now have to get it rolling again. That’s an ordeal that makes one a bit apprehensive, since unloading the bed also removes the traction needed to pull out of the slippery creekbed. No Sure-Grip available, remember? One-wheel drive. And this is the Work Special – a rev-happy passenger car engine with a very tall axle. So you try to dance the line between breaking the tires loose and frying that big clutch under a full load.
I know, I know. “Well, Dopey,” I can hear you mutter, “Why didn’t you either get an automatic trans or get the next model up that would let you add the performance axle and limited slip?” Two answers: One, money - and a lot of it to upgrade - money I didn’t have. Two, think about it: the plain-Jane ’58 GMC was as happy as a clam doing this same type of work. It was a truck engineered and offered competently right out of the box, no options. Decades later, the Dodge pickup was intentionally standard-equipped to not do anything particularly well as a working truck. They did not permit you to add any options needed to make it useful. Read the owners manual. They don’t say you can’t haul a load, but they do caution you not to try to pull any trailer with it – not even a thousand pounder – or the “drivetrain” will fold up. That translates to mean the slow-rotating and so more highly loaded trans, u-joints, and diff gears. The prohibition applies to both manual and auto transmissions. That just isn’t right, folks.
If one set of managers knew enough to take 235 inches and make it do the common jobs, why did the 239 crew decide to make their truck fail common tasks and then prohibit any fix on the option sheet? I understand CAFÉ fuel economy demands and fleet mileage weighting. But it is a light-duty truck, isn’t it? The answer is that one management team decided that the way to win market share was to force you to trade up by 20% if you actually needed to do anything truck-like with their truck. My, how times have changed.
The old mentality was that every model offered was to be usable, and options were for higher loads and more convenience. Today’s mentality is to grow the assumption that standard models are substandard, and you’ll need to option them up in order to do anything with them. It’s the same basic reasoning that makes economy cars ugly, when the cost to improve the basic styling is nearly zero. The pickup makers aren’t afraid of the poor test results and reviews that would result from standard models, because they don’t supply such fare for tests, and the test rags want heavily optioned hardware (and want the brand advertising revenue that follows a positive write-up). They’re part of the problem.
Sure, you probably wouldn’t order a stripper yourself, but think about the reason. It would be crappy. You know it. The manufacturer knows it. And as long as they know that you are convinced of that, you are right where they want you. But poorly performing hardware leaves the door open to other manufacturers that make even their base models right, whether foreign or domestic. So, the perception comes easier that the competitor’s vehicles are better. They tend not to offer bad combinations, because they want positive perceptions to be their differentiator. Regardless of price, if you cannot buy a loser, you therefore cannot lose by buying that other brand. In the long run, this affects market share.
What should Dodge have done on the new WS in its introductory year of 1994? Allowed purchase of a normal axle ratio and a limited-slip diff, two assemblies already sitting in the parts bins alongside the assembly line. Their desire to compete in the horsepower race is understandable, even though horsepower is much less useful than low-end torque. It advertises well because it sounds better and they figure that you don’t know any better. Ads showing two trailer-toting pickups drag racing doesn’t show how much more throttle and downshifting the winner requires to hold its speed on long grades. Dodge’s desire to do what they could to boost general gas mileage ratings is also understandable, but not at the cost of irreparably crippling the vehicle. And Dodge knew better, since they boasted of their mighty V-10 that same year, and the usefulness of having more torque at idle than the V-6 could wheeze out at its peak.
If the Dodge is so awful, why haven’t I dumped it? Well, the GMC never could have made 200,000 miles in one shot, and the Dodge still runs like a refrigerator. Aside from an appetite for catalytic converters, it’s had amazingly little work done on it. Sure, it uses oil and has less oil pressure than it did, but it's still a daily driver. It’s just one more example of the superior metallurgy and manufacturing tolerances attained in the last couple of decades (by everybody). Ball joints will be coming up before long, but with its new clutch and oil pump (both replaced merely as a precaution at 150K), there seems to be no particular reason why it won’t cross 250,000 or more. Regrettably, it does have a blade-like window channel edge that prevents you from comfortably hanging your arm out the window, and thus fails the sunny afternoon pleasure-drive test. But it gets me (and not much else) around, and I now have a 2008 pickup to do the heavy lifting – I’ve never expected the ‘94 to be able to pull a three-up horse trailer!
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