Free Republic

We guess Ford didn’t have the budget to hire Dylan Mulvaney to step out of the driver’s seat of its rainbow-flag Raptor. See, you have two trucks so covered in mud you can’t tell the difference … until the mud washes off and one is revealed to be a Pride-themed truck. In case you didn’t get it, Ford lights up the word “tough” in rainbow lights. Ford doesn’t have any Clydesdales handy to whip out a new ad as Anheuser-Busch did.

Once upon a time, the manual transmission was the default transmission choice for a pickup truck. The automatic was a luxury option that robbed trucks of both power and mpg. But the final full-size pickup truck with the manual transmission (the 2018 Cummins-powered Ram) has come and gone. So who is to blame for the death of the manual transmission pickup truck? The truth is that increased engine torque, government regulations, and the capabilities of the average driver are all partially responsible. But at the end of the day, we killed the manual truck; automakers don’t offer manual transmission full-size...

Like spoiled children, liberals never give up when they want something, and they can never get enough. Whether it’s more redistribution of taxpayer money, more acceptance of unacceptable behavior, or another cookie, left-wingers always want more. Perfect example: Rather than “only” coming after our evil, planet-destroying passenger cars, the left is targeting our pickup trucks as well, my fellow Americans.Moreover, the idiocy is neither new nor driven only by the left’s hatred of internal combustion engines.As I first reported in January 2021 — and this is laugh-out-loud hysterical — pickup trucks not only brazenly project “petromasculinity”; they’re also the personification...

If you blinked you might have missed the momentous occasion of the release of the second part of the UN IPCC’s sixth assessment report of how we're all going to die unless we all board jets and attend global warming conferences. Or give lots of money to those officials who do it for us.Since no one reads these things anyway, by the time the fourteenth chapter of the second part of the sixth assessment rolled around, everyone was drunk and decided to take shots at conservatives.Chapter 14 was on North America and warned of the threat posed by "individualistic" conservatives...

Border Patrol agents gave chase to the Chevrolet Silverado pickup, which had two people in the cab and nine in the bed, about 4:25 p.m., CHP spokesman Officer Travis Garrow said. The truck crashed while fleeing at an “extremely high rate of speed” on the two-lane interstate east of Crestwood Road near the Golden Acorn Casino. “It was spike-stripped by the Border Patrol, continued westbound, went up a dirt and rock embankment and rolled, ejecting either nine or 10 people out of the vehicle,” Garrow said. A male driver and a female passenger were believed to be the only occupants...

It’s easy for U.S. drivers to forget the high gas prices in recent years after the ultra-lows seen only months ago, but prices going into the summer months of 2016 are still well below what they were this time last year, and the lowest price heading into the summer months since 2009. Despite a recent uptick in the price per barrel of oil—up $20 since the last week of January 2016—U.S. drivers will still enjoy the low gas prices this summer. The spot price for WTI crude oil is still significantly lower than this time last year, trading today at...

Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, seems to have reached cult status with green ideologues, as well as with many in the media. Musk's name often goes hand in hand with descriptive monikers like "visionary" and "genius." Of course, what Musk is really a genius at is getting politicians to fund his private businesses ventures with taxpayer money so they don't have to make a profit. It might also be time to step back and ponder the genius of Musk's latest idea. It is for Tesla to compete with Ford's best selling F-series trucks by offering up an electric pickup truck....

The two-week partial shutdown of the U.S. government, affecting 800,000 federal employees, has experts uncertain about how automotive sales will be affected. Ford, GM and Ram all seem to be expecting strong sales numbers for October, especially in the booming pickup truck segment, but none seem certain how the shutdown could impact consumers' future big-ticket spending decisions. That's because the shutdown increased consumer anxiety about the overall U.S. economy, according to a story by Consumer Affairs Editor Kelsey Mays at Cars.com, and consumer confidence has not increased much since the shutdown ceased. Apparently there's no shortage of opinions about how...

We are honoring a unique and creative patriot today, he is the President of Max Motors in Butler, MO. I first learned of Mr. Muller through my husband when he came home from work one day. He got me on the computer and told me to go to YouTube, saying there was something I had to see. There was Mark interviewing with a reporter on CNN. He was superb in his representation and extremely quick-witted. I would say he did an exceptional job and took over the interview, standing out far beyond the reporter. They interviewed him based on his...

CORAL GABLES, Fla. -- Founded in the 1920s as a fantasyland of Mediterranean architecture, this affluent Miami suburb, one of the nation's first planned communities, has a long-standing reputation for zealous aesthetic policing, ruling over everything from hedge heights to what colors residents may paint their homes. Now a guy in a pickup truck is threatening the social order. Lowell Kuvin, 44, wound up on the wrong side of the local code one night four years ago when he parked his forest-green 1993 Ford F-150 outside the house he was renting. The city defines pickup trucks, even those for personal...

I've been spending the last few months mulling over a new vehicle purchase, and I'm hoping to get some input from Freepers who may have purchased a full-sized pickup truck in the last couple of years. I currently drive a 1994 Ford Explorer, and I rented a 2005 model for a weekend this spring while mine was having some work done on it. I'm not thrilled with the current generation of Explorers, mainly because the driver's seat feels more cramped due to some of the safety features that have been added over the years (airbags in particular). I looked into...

WASHINGTON (AP) - The government has upgraded its investigation into reports that tailgates are falling off the back of some General Motors Corp. pickup trucks without warning. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Monday said it was reviewing tailgate support cables installed in 1998-2004 model years of the Chevrolet Sonoma and S10 pickups and the 1998, 1999 and part of the 2000 model years of the Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra. GM officials said the upgraded investigation covered 3.1 million vehicles. It advances an investigation, which was opened in February 2004, of the Sierra from model years 1999-2002; the...

The national press was all atwitter this weekend over the announcement that Howard Dean was going to skip public financing in his campaign for the Democratic nomination for President. However, the press was unanimous in missing one of the small but necessary elements within that decision, and they therefore missed the big picture – the real story. The real story is that this election is now over. Howard Dean (or "James Dean," as a reporterette for Fox News called him once) now owns the Democratic nomination. George Bush now owns the general election. And once you've finished reading this column,...