2018 One-Ton Heavy-Duty Truck Challenge — PickUpTrucks.com

Maybe you didn’t know this about the crew of PickUpTrucks. com but we loveto tow. That’s why we love one ton single rear-wheel turbo diesel 4×4 pickuptrucks and we know you do too. So that’s why we brought this group of heavyhaulers to the mountains and deserts of Arizona for the 2018 One Ton TruckChallenge. The first truck is the Chevy Silverado 3500 6. 6 liter Duramax V8 withthe High Country trim package. Next, the Ford Superduty F-350 6. 7 liter PowerStroke V8 in the Lariat trim. And finally the Ram 3500 6. 7 liter Cummins i6 inLaramie trim. Every one of our diesels is rated at more than nine hundredfoot-pounds of torque but we know torque isn’t the only reasonpeople buy these vehicles. We start our contest with fuel economy. For the fueleconomy portion of our contest we ran our trucks over a ninety plus mile loopthrough the Arizona desert that included some lonely two-lane highway, a goodportion of gravelly dirt road through the backcountry, some multi-lane freeway,a good long city section, as well as a winding mountainous hill climb. What wefound after our empty and loaded testing loops is that the Chevy is not only apowerful player at the track, it also does quite well in everyday driving onall sorts of road surfaces. The Chevy Duramax averaged a respectable 18. 7miles per gallon on our test loop when empty while the Ford Super Dutydelivered 17. 8 miles per gallon with Ram’s Cummins finishing withan average of 16. 9. When running the exact loop later in the daywith our loaded trailers, meaning they had to haul an extra 13,000 pounds, theresults were similar but not exactly the same. Chevy won the contest again with a10. 4 miles per gallon. But this time the Ram came in secondplace with a solid 9. 9 miles per gallon while the Ford F-350 struggledwith a 9. 2 miles per gallon calculation. But running a long mileagetest is just one way to test an engine’s capability to see what they canreally do, nothing beats a good old-fashioned drag race. For that we cameto the Kingman Airport where they closed down one of their taxi runways so thatwe could do some wide-open throttle quarter-mile runs both empty and withour 13,000 pound trailers. Not surprisingly the Ram 3500 Cummins wasthe slowest of our three with an empty 0 to 60 time of nine and a half secondsand a quarter-mile time of 16. 9 seconds at 84. 7 miles perhour. As you also might expect when loaded with a 13,000 pound trailer theRam was also the slowest of the bunch with a 20 second zero to sixty timeand a quarter-mile run of 22. 4 seconds at 64. 1miles per hour. Finishing in second place by the smallest of margins, theFord F-350 Power Stroke ran an empty 0 to 60 time of 7. 9 seconds and aquarter-mile run in15. 8 seconds at 91 miles an hour and with ourloaded Big Tex gooseneck dump bed the F-350 ran up to 60 miles an hour in 17. 3seconds with a quarter-mile time of 21. 4 seconds at 67. 2miles per hour. And in first place just inching out the Super Duty by the slimmest of margins, theChevy Silverado 3500 Duramax proved to be a rocket off the line in zero to 60the best run was timed at 7. 8 seconds and it ran a quartermile in 15. 6 seconds at 92 miles per hour. In loaded testing theDuramax ran to sixty miles an hour in 17. 2 seconds and ran aquarter mile at wide open throttle in just over 21 seconds at 67. 8miles per hour. So no big surprise that the ChevyDuramax did so well on the quarter-mile but how did it do pulling up the DavisDam grade? Our tow testing was done on the infamous Highway 68 Davis Dam gradeoutside Bullhead City, Arizona. That’s an 11 mile section of road that climbsabout 3,000 feet from bottom to summit. Knowing that all these turbo dieselengines are monster pullers we chose the steepest two-mile section of the climbto conduct our head-to-head runs, most of which is at a six or seven percent grade. As a testament to how competitive the Ford and Chevy are, they ran a distanceseparated by less than one second but it was through the mid section of the runthat the Chevy Duramax just nosed ahead of the Ford Powerstroke. Chevy’s time wasjust a little over two minutes and three seconds with a 74 mile per hour topspeed while the Ford was just 2 minutes and 4 seconds with a 72 mile an hour topspeed. The Ram Cummins ran a respectable 2 minutes and 16 seconds with a 68 mileper hour top speed. We should also note that we conducted several real-world40-60 tests on a designated stretch of the Davis Dam Hill Climb where we goteach one ton into fourth gear up the hill to 40 miles an hour, then flatfooted the throttle to see how long it would take each of them to run back upto 60. Although the finishing order was predictable the fact that they were allso close is not. The Chevy ran forty to sixty in18. 23 seconds the Ford in 18. 31 secondsand the Ram in 18. 76 seconds. In the end after we added allour scores from the weeks worth of testing the winner of our challenge wasthe Chevy Silverado 3500 with its powerful V8 Duramax, plush interior andtowing comfort. Coming a close second was the F-350 Power Stroke. While it’spowertrain was plenty tough enough, the Lariat interior left us wanting and itdidn’t seem to tow with as much confidence as the others. And bringing upthe rear in third place was the Ram 3500. While a worthy competitor in thiscompetition it fell short in most of our track testing and offers a challengingmedia system. So there you have it. We want to offer our sincerecongratulations to the winner. This is one of our tightest competitions as longas we can remember but we also want to make a special note that these are notperfect trucks. There’s plenty of room to improve and make better and when themanufacturers do that we’ll be right here to test again. For a more detailedlook at this story go to PickupTrucks. com.

source https://cardetailingphoenix.com/index.php/2018/09/22/2018-one-ton-heavy-duty-truck-challenge-pickuptrucks-com-2/