Mr. Pratt,
I realize that you did not write the article " 99 Truck of the Year", Bill
Blankenship did. Unfortunatly, I couldn't find an Email address for him and
yours caught my eye. If you would be so kind as to forward this to Mr.
Blankenship, it would be much appreciated!
First and foremost, I was curious about the way you applied the
"standards" to your test vehicles. For example. you included the Ford
Ranger in the test (mostly unchanged from last year's model) by left out
the Dodge Dakota R/T. The only thing I could see that was new was the four
doors and that hardly rates the entire vehicle as new!
The reason I brought this up was that, in my opinion and those of many of
the folks I associate with, Dodge trucks (most specifically the Dakota) get
a bad rap in the truck magazines! The current models are either ignored or
barely mentioned. (Yet, strangely enough, there have been a LOT of writeups
on the concepts vehicles.....)The new Dodge Dakota is one of the fastest,
best handling trucks on the road! The statistics you published (with the
exception of Ford Lightning whose stats were impressive) are almost all
easily bested by the Dakota 318, not even mentioning the outstanding
performance of the R/T model!
It is possible that I am off base here (vis a vis the seeming predjudice
against Mopar) and if that is true, I apologize. However, that having been
said, give the Dakota it's fair chance!
David "Preacher" Slocum
99 5.2L CC 4x4 SLT+
http://fly.to/bastaards
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