Ask Jack: A Truck Without Consequences?

Sixteen thousand, five hundred miles. In ten months. It would be fair to say that I’m getting a lot of use out of my Silverado “Max Tow”. What that number doesn’t make plain, however, is how much effort I put into not driving the truck. Unless the hitch is in use or there is some kind of load in the bed, I don’t take it out of the driveway.

This is not sitting well with my wife, the infamous Danger Girl. She point outs that we should be able to get a quarter-million miles on the truck and it makes very little sense to use something that is plainly more expensive to run, such as my ZX-14R, rather than the Silverado. All I can say in response is that I feel guilty using a three-ton-plus vehicle for the drive to work or dinner. It’s a mild form of mental illness, I suppose.

Not everybody is crazy like me. Which brings me to today’s “Ask Jack” questioner, who is in a rather unique position to go truckin’ like the Doo-dah man.

What’s worse than a rich kid asking you what car to get? It’s probably when somebody is getting a free car lol. Or in my case, a free truck lol. I’m being sent to Texas for a work assignment that would last maybe two years, possibly three. Living in the city I never had a truck and didn’t see the need. Basically, I can have a three-year lease paid by the company for a truck. The new Ram looks pretty good, but I remember you bought the Chevy. What should I do?

This was a remarkably terse email, so I’m going to make a couple of assumptions. I’m going to assume that the would-be company truck in question is a half-ton full-sizer, most likely a crew cab. So we can leave stuff like the Ridgeline and the Dodge Power Wagon out of this. I’m also going to assume that Bobby isn’t able to get something like a Tahoe RST or a Range Rover instead of the truck.

Given what an outsized presence half-tons have on both the American road and the American economy, it’s kind of odd to think that there are relatively few entries in the marketplace. They are:

* Ford F-150

Did I forget any? Who cares if I did, because these are the only trucks that matter.

Right off the bat, I think we can forget about the Nissan Titan. It looks weird and I can’t see what it offers that the other trucks don’t. Sure, there’s that mid-size diesel, but… nah.

Normally the Tundra would be the next to go, but it happens to have a bit of an inside line here because it’s actually built in Texas. You never know. It might come in handy if Bobby has to deal with people who earn some or all of their living from the Toyota presence here.

My experience with the Silverado has been outstanding but there’s no point in leasing the old model and the new one isn’t available yet.

So I think this is a three-way fight between the local-favorite Tundra, the default-choice F-150, and the new Ram. Given that this is a company-paid lease and not a long-term personal purchase, I would find it very hard to say no to the Ram. It looks good, it will ride better than the others, and it has some utterly gobsmacking infotainment options. Last but not least, it might be cheaper to lease than the others thanks to incentives. So in Bobby’s shoes, I’d order myself a crew-cab Ram with every option in the book, and I’d make sure I’m in Amarillo by morning.

That’s a country song, in case you don’t know as much about country as I do. I know a lot about country music now. I’m a truck owner, you see.

[Image: © 2018 Matthew Guy/TTAC]