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Filed under: Hybrid, Truck, Chrysler, Dodge

Ram 1500 pickup truck

Have you been waiting for Chrysler’s long-promised Ram hybrid pickup truck? Bad news: Speaking to PluginCars.com, Ram Trucks CEO Fred Diaz firmly put that notion on ice when he bluntly said, “Truckers don’t want to buy hybrids.”

We’re not sure truck buyers are so much anti-hybrid as they are unwilling to cough up the necessary bucks to bring meaningful hybrid technology to their pickups. Either way, General Motors’ full-size hybrid trucks have failed to set the market on fire, and there’s little indication Chrysler’s would either, unless the automaker were to offer them at an extremely favorable price point. That seems unlikely.

For now, it seems that the only hybrid pickup trucks Ram will offer are the recently announced plug-in models that were developed using federal stimulus funds via a $48 million American Recovery and Reinvestment Act grant and a separate $5 million grant from the Canadian government. A total of 140 PHEV Ram trucks will be offered to fleet customers within the next several months.

The good news for mileage-conscious pickup truck buyers is that Diaz suggested other technologies from Fiat are likely to make their way to the Ram Trucks division at some point. Multiair and light-duty diesels sound like a good starting point…

[Source: PluginCars.com]

Report: Ram Trucks will not offer hybrid pickup to consumers originally appeared on Autoblog on Sat, 12 Feb 2011 15:36:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Hybrid, Government/Legal, Electric, Diesel

EPA/DOT Proposed Fuel Economy Labels – Click above for high-res versions

It’s always a tough road to hoe when it comes time to make wholesale changes to something consumers know and are comfortable with – just ask Car and Driver. But, progress is progress, and sometimes a redesign is necessary in order to keep pace with the times.

Such is the case with today’s fuel economy labels. Although we all understand what miles per gallon means (well, mostly…) and what kind of figures we should expect from a given type of vehicle, the future has plenty in store that will drastically change all of that; namely, electric cars and plug-in hybrids. That being the case, the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Transportation were charged with designing completely revised fuel economy labels for new vehicles at the dealership.

Judging by the response from our earlier article on the subject, consumers are split on the new stickers’ effectiveness. A new study from Siegel+Gale seems to confirm this suspicion. The full details can be found in the press release after the break and from this PDF, but the gist is as follows:

Two-thirds of respondents preferred the horizontal option over the vertical option (see here), but 38-percent still found something confusing about the winning label. A resounding 86 percent said that miles per gallon was the most important figure, while 68 percent cared most about greenhouse gas emissions.

As for us, we’re thinking that much of the problem lies with the fact that the public at large still doesn’t understand electric vehicles and, more specifically, extended-range electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids. Many of the features consumers say they could do without were added to the labels in an attempt to give an accurate representation of electric vehicle mileage benefits.

Gallery: EPA/DOT Proposed Fuel Economy Labels

[Source: Siegel+Gale]

Continue reading Survey: Consumers find proposed new fuel economy labels confusing

Survey: Consumers find proposed new fuel economy labels confusing originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 29 Sep 2010 17:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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