Mike Romain proclaimed:
Would be easier to believe it was because of no mileage standards in pickups...yet. As for the reaction time, the switch back to 8 cyl mode is under 3/4 of a rev, making it under half of an ignition cycle. Haven't seen any mentions of hemi hesitation in any of the road tests of the hemi GC...which turns mid 6's to 60 in any of the tests I've seen.
I come from the old muscle car era as well, having had the pleasure of owning more than one engine over 7 liters with compression ratios in in the 12:1 range. Although the thundering torque was a lot of fun, a much smaller modern engine with modern engine management systems does much better except in dim memories. Granted it was a lot easier to hop up the old rat motors, wedge heads, etc. without a PhD, but then again you actually *had* to do this to get anywhere near the advertised performance except on a very few purposely underrated homologation special models.
Hmmm, ya think that is what is causing the hesitation?