Warren truck assy plant has had its first volume related shutdown in over 10 years. And possibly more downtime is coming! The main reason for the downtime is the extremely slow sales of the new Dakota. A friend of mine is a dodge salesman here in the Detroit area and he has told me he can't give these things away. Apparently the boys in Auburn Hills must not want to sell cars and trucks anymore. The first causality was the Durango, then Dakota, and currently Charger. Next up on the block is the Ram. Trevor Creed and the rest of the design team should be tared and feathered for all of these debacles! Sorry for the rant, but as a concerned employee I just can't stand by and watch the company go in the crapper![:@]

Joe

 

I'll back ya up on that. I was getting excited about the new Mega Cab Ram coming out next year. Then I found out about the Dakota style facelift... [:'(] I can't believe how badly they're screwing up good things.

 

That's good 'ol Dumler for ya'. The only thing they really want to do is put more money into their Benz operations, they were found taking huge fistfulls of Chrysler profits and funds and putting it into the Benz divisions.[:@][:@]

 

I think that the new Dakota looks great. I love the new grill and I was wating for it to go on the Ram. Give DC time for the Charger. I do agree on that the Durango looks terrible. But the Dakota does not. Everyone down here in the south loves them..

 

The Dakota looks just like the freakin Durango... It's a abortion...

By the way, it's people in the south that have made the F150 the highest selling truck for so damn long...

[sm=dontgetit.gif][sm=icon_stickpoke.gif]

 

I think the Charger will catch on, but the Dakota is one ugly truck. They really mangled the features with the re-style for sure. I've seen only one on the road so far.

 

I've only seen one on the road myself, and I heard that an ex-biotch's brother bought one.. [:'(] Every time I pass the dodge dealer I just get the urge to jerk the wheel and ram that fugly POS... [:@]

 

I have a comment that is slightly off-topic but is tangentially related...

I own a 1997 Dakota club cab base model, V6, manual transmission. To be honest, if I could choose between a 2005 Dakota and a brand-new clone of my 1997, I'd take the 1997 re-issue in a heartbeat. Maybe I just got lucky and my truck was made on a good day, with all of the parts bins being "good batches" and whatever... but the fact is, at 150k miles, my truck runs as good as it did when it was new. Hardly any rattles or squeaks. No slop in the steering or suspension. It doesn't even burn any noticeable amount of oil, and it doesn't drip any either. Original starter. Original alternator. Original fuel injectors. Original fuel pump. Original valve cover gaskets (although they are beginning to seep very slightly, to be expected). Original muffler. Original oxygen sensors. It even has the original CLUTCH!

With the exception of maintenance items and just a few replacement parts (front brake calipers, upper and lower balljoints, and a noisy timing chain) my truck is bone stock OEM factory original.

What's my point?

Again, maybe I just got lucky, but I have to wonder... why did they have to go and scrap a good truck platform like this? Mine was even the first model year of that platform, so common sense would say that it'd be the most likely to have bugs... yet it's been the best vehicle I've ever owned. This does not apply just to the Dakota or even just to Dodge... in general, I find it ridiculous that automotive companies invest millions of dollars in a vehicle platform, and then do ground-up redesigns every 5-10 years or whatever. In the case of the Dakota... why couldn't they have just continued building that platform, and perfect the thing over time? Ok, give the truck some external changes just to satisfy the people concerned with aesthetics... but under the skin, why did they really need to scrap the chassis and do a complete ground-up redesign? My '97 has given me 150k miles of never-been-stranded reliability. Yes, it's got the aged 3.9L V6... but in terms of the vehicle platform itself, it just seems to me that if they would extend that Dakota platform for a 15-20 year production run, they could gain three huge benefits... first, they could work out all the bugs (not that my truck had many to begin with), and they could save money because there would be no re-design by the engineers, and they could also save money because of no major re-tooling as would happen in a re-design. A good example of what I'm talking about is the VW bug (the original one of course). Look at the longevity of that thing.

But, this industry is market driven and the market apparently demands everything to be NEW NEW NEW, new and improved, etc etc blah blah. I guess people in general don't want to see the same product year after year after year. They'd rather pay to have the existing, perfectly adequate vehicle platform totally scrapped and re-designed from the ground up, have new bugs introduced, and then repeat the whole process again 5-10 years down the road.

Maybe I should live in Russia, because I guess I have a relatively utilitarian viewpoint on this topic... but give me a brand-new clone of my 1997 base model no options Dakota and I'll (hopefully) be a happy camper for the next 150,000+ miles and/or 8+ years.

 

Ah, I am glad I wasn't the only one who thought the new Dakato front end was fugly.

 

in Soviet Russia Dodge Dakota redesigns YOU!