Hey Guys,
I'm a long time Dodge truck fan, but am currently without one. I've been looking for a late 90s/early 00s Dodge Ram or Dakota and recently found a 2000 Dodge Dakota 4x4 Sport with the 4.7 engine and I'm looking for a little advice. It's located at a dealer which originally stated the 4x4 worked great. Once I got there for the test drive yesterday, the 4x4 lever was actually swinging free and won't engage other than 2wd. I was pretty upset, being as I had been told that there was no issue with the 4x4 operation. They offered to drop the already fairly low price by $500, but that is it. I looked into the shift-linkage issue that seems to be fairly common, but since I didn't own this truck, I'm not sure that the transfer case would operate just fine once this issue is fixed.

Do you guys have any thoughts or suggestions; pursue this truck further, or is it too risky? The truck only has 75k miles on it which is why I'm still somewhat interested.

Thanks a lot for your help.

 

I would try to get the dealer to fix it before I bought it.

 

Thanks man - that's kind of what I'm thinking. If it's really only going to be an easy fix - why don't they do it...

 

A very common problem is the rubber bushings that work the 4x4 linkage rot and the linkage disconnects.

It easy enough to tell if you crawl under the truck and look at the linkage.

You can always manually shift it from underneath.

 

^Thanks man. Yeah, I was working with a dealership a couple of hours away and by the time I got there it was dark I didn't get a chance to get under the truck to take a look at it after our test drive went awry...If they still have it next week I'm going to go back and take a better look now that I've done some research on the problem - it just wasn't something I wanted to take a chance with until I looked into it a little more.

Thanks for the replies guys.