Tag: trucks

Found on Road Dead

Guest Post by Visayas Outpost

Somewhere in Interweb land, a guy with a new-ish Ford truck ended up spending $5,600 to fix a burned-out taillight.  You read that correctly.  The story has been making the rounds via the mechanic who diagnosed and repaired the vehicle.  The truck’s owner brought it in because of numerous electronic faults affecting the stereo, the HVAC system, and finally the entire dash.  Eventually the $60,000 techno-wonder would not start.

Mechanic Brian Makuloco correctly diagnosed that the truck’s CANBUS wiring system was causing a cascade of computer module failures, originating in the blind spot and cross-traffic monitoring  sensor(s).  Those happen to be located in the taillight, and failed because of a leaky seal.  The seal itself is apparently not a replacement part, but the taillight is $1000.  Add up the other five or six computer modules that got fried, plus labor, and the bill came to $5,600.  The owner took some advice he got online and submitted it as an insurance claim!  But it only covered $5,100.

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The Disposable Truck

Guest Post by Eric Peters

Trucks continue to get bigger – what buyers seem to want – while their engines get smaller, which is effectively a function of what the government demands, as the downsizing of engines is one of the ways for the car companies to reduce the fuel consumption of the vehicles so equipped.

Which they have to do – not because buyers of trucks (or even most cars) are demanding fuel economy uber alles but because the government refuses to accept that lots of buyers care about other things uber alles. So the government mandates the fuel economy they’re not particularly interested in, in order to force buyers to be more “efficient” – no matter what it costs them.

And the car companies try to figure a way to make those smaller, more “efficient” engines perform at a level acceptable to buyers.

Enter the 2019 Chevy Silverado 1500 – the leading edge of this strange, increasingly desperate dynamic. It will be the first full-size truck to come standard with a four cylinder engine – comparable in size (2.7 liters) to the engines that power mid-sized cars that weigh 1,000-plus pounds less and which aren’t tasked with towing thousands of pounds.

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THE DAY TBP ALMOST DIED IN A DITCH ON I-80

A few hours ago the odds of this post or any future post being made on TBP ever again looked awfully slim. Just another uneventful trip to Penn State.

Our multi-pronged moving of my youngest son into his apartment at Penn State Altoona and my older son into his house (shared with 15 other guys) at State College went so smoothly I almost couldn’t believe it. We drove my youngest with his stuff jammed into our “new” Honda Civic (bought after crazy lady in BMW destroyed our other Civic several weeks ago).

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And Then They Came For the Big Rigs

Guest Post by Eric Peters

No one appears to have noticed this yet. But they will.

Not on the road – or at the car dealership.

At the supermarket.   

For openers.

Uncle is “proposing” a “program” (the soft-sell language hides the reality of regulations issued by an unelected bureaucracy – EPA – which will be extremely mandatory) in order to “Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Improve Fuel Efficiency (their exact language, in the EPA’s pretentious Federal All Caps Style)  of “Medium, and Heavy Duty Vehicles.”

OBAMA’S 11 POINT RESPONSE TO THE FRENCH TRAGEDY

Posted by Yojimbo

1. No one needs a commercial truck this large.

2. The Founding Fathers never envisioned large commercial trucks, and did not intend for people to drive them.

3. These “assault trucks” are designed for killing large numbers of people quickly, and that is their only use.

4. We need a “no truck” list immediately, one that does not require due process to get on or off.

5. No where in the Constitution does it mention the freedom to own these killing devices called trucks.

6. Large commercial trucks should only be owned by the police, military, or politicians, NOT normal citizens, who can use horses.

7. We already have licensing, registration, titles, inspection, and multiple taxes on large commercial vehicles, and STILL they are used for mass killing. Enough is enough. We must ban them entirely.

8. We must follow Australia’s example – we must have a massive government buy-back of all trucks currently owned by American citizens, then, they must be destroyed.

9. We must empower the police and military to go door-to-door to forcibly remove these “assault trucks”. Deadly force is reasonable when “disarming” people of these killing devices.

10. If it will save the life of even a single child, we must rid our society of trucks.

11. And lastly, we must continue to resettle enormous numbers of Muslims throughout the United States, primarily in rural, white, Christian areas.