When I was a kid, one of my favorite movies was Twister. It’s sometimes said that we don’t write about big pickups enough.
My birthday is on Thursday and that’s when you get a rare second round of this series detailing the histories of uncommon vehicles. That’s two Grails in one week, two awesome vehicles with a spotlight on them. This week, I’ve been asked to write a double feature of Holy Grails. You could buy a Dodge Ram powered by a 12-valve Cummins diesel and pair it with a five-speed manual transmission. From 1994 to 1998, Dodge sold a holy grail of full-size pickups. A little over two decades ago, you could buy diesels that could seemingly survive the heat death of the universe while pulling a house at the same time. For those still holding onto their diesel steeds, it’s a life of working with finicky emissions equipment, a fading fuel economy advantage, and high fuel costs.
In the past decade, diesel went from being the potential future of internal combustion to the equivalent of a subject best talked about in private.
