"After strong start, Tundra stumbles"

Tundra's September YTD unit sales are down 50.8%, the second greatest drop in the segment after that of the Titan, more than twice the F- Series drop of 24.8% and considerably more than the segment's decline of 34.1%. In nine months, Toyota dealers have delivered just 56,599 Tundras, which means total 2009 deliveries will fall short of the century mark for the first time since 2002.

Actual transaction prices from Edmunds.com highlight the Tundra's declining clout. In eleven of the twelve months in 2008, Tundra sold at a higher transaction price than the F-150, Silverado 1500, Ram 1500 and Titan. However, in every month of 2009, one or more of the domestic light-duty pickups has sold at a higher price than the Toyota product. This past September, average transaction prices for the Ram

1500 ($35,503) and F-150 ($34,824) were 7% and 5%, respectively, above that of the Tundra ($33,278).

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Reply to
john
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No need for you to be so self-referential.

Reply to
Ashton Crusher

No need for you to continually imitate a rat's penis.

Reply to
M. Balmer

No need for you to be so self-referential.

Reply to
Ashton Crusher

The new Tundra was a disaster from the beginning. I don't think Toyota management understood the type of truck buyers who were willing to buy a Toyota. The old Tundra was a solid truck of a decent size and actually had advantages over some of the competitor strucks. The new Tundra is ridulosusly large, wildly overpriced and doesn't appear to have any features that set it apart from the crowd of large "half-ton" trucks. And the numerous quality and reliabilty problems have trashed Toyota's reputation for quality in the eyes of many people. Spending billions on the Tundra plant in Texas was probably the single dumbest decision that Toyota managment has made in thirty years. I am sure Toyota will survive the debacle, but I am also sure Toyota's current management wish they had spent those billions on other products.

Ed

Reply to
Ed White

No need for you to be so self-referential.

No need for you to be so self-referential.

No need for you to be so self-referential.

No need for you to be so self-referential.

Reply to
M. Balmer

And where's the surprise here?

A massively over-bulked pickup introduced at the start of a gas price spike. With no 3/4 or one-ton option to appeal to contractors. With no diesel option to appeal to farmers, moving companies, RV-towing retirees, or other mid-sized hauling operations. With an immediate record of reliability problems guaranteed to scare away cautious, bottom-line oriented, data-driven fleet buyers who don't buy into the Japanese reliability mythos as readily as consumers.

It was a condo-dweller's weekend Home Depot run truck (or city poseur truck to be blunt) introduced at the VERY instant in time when the demand for city poseur trucks was guaranteed to tank.

Reply to
Steve

When you put it that way, I get deja vu of a Nissan Titan.

Reply to
E. Meyer

Is it really that bad? What have been the reliability problems? I only know one person who owns a Tundra and he seems to like it. I know several people with the Tacoma? the smaller one and they all like them.

Reply to
Ashton Crusher

They're far from horrible, but there have been brake and front suspension problems. Not the kind of thing you want to see in a "tough" vehicle from the allegedly (self proclaimed anyway) best carmaker in the world.

Reply to
Steve

The smaller Tundra was a much better vehicle. The new huge Tundra is a bad copy of a Silverado that incorporates as many bad Ford and Dodge ideas as they could tack on. Billions wasted.

Ed

Reply to
C. E. White

There ARE no bad Dodge ideas... well, in trucks anyway. :-p

Reply to
Steve

I guess we will see about the current model. I have to wonder about the coil spring rear end. GMC tried that decades ago and it was not exactly a sucess. In theory it should be just fine, but as I recall, when you overloaded a GMC with the coil spring rear suspension, you often wrecked the springs. And if you were on dirt a lot, the shock would fail, and since coils don't have the same sort of inherent damping as leaf springs, the rear end would start bouuncing all over the place. I can still remeber watching the beds of GMCs with worn out shocks bouncing down the road like someone bouncing a basketball. I suppose shocks are better now, but I still susspect for a vehicle like a pickup that has to carry radically different loads in the bed, leaf springs are a better deal.

My only close experience with Dodge trucks are the ones my nearest neighbor owned. He had two in the 1990's, both with the Cummins Diesel. He liked them both, but both had transmission problems (one got a new transmisison and that failed too). He is happier with his current Chevy Duramax, but he is not opposed to buying a new Dodge. It seems to me that Dodges are attractive to the "mavericks," that is people who want to appear to be different (even if they really are just the same). I can't really think of any reason not to buy a Dodge, I just can't think of a reason to buy one either.

Ed

Reply to
C. E. White

No, just bad Dodge trucks. Like the worst on the market. Total garbage.

Reply to
M. Balmer

Coming from a GM man, I will admit this:

Toyota makes a lot of decent vehicles.

The Tundra just aint one of them!

Reply to
jr92

My theory is they just didn't give it a sufficiently masculine name. You know, something that would have fit in the lineup alongside the Foreskinner SUV and Prepuce hybrid.

:-) :-)

Reply to
Steve

All very true and the reason the industry stayed away from coils for so long. But comparing the old GM long trailing arm rear leaf suspension to the new Dodge multi-link suspension is kinda like comparing the front suspension of a Model T to the front suspension of a Lamborghini. Well, almost that extreme anyway. I think its an amazing performer, and makes me wonder why pickup trucks have stuck with leafs so long. Dump trucks and tractor-trailers went to air bag suspension and big shocks 20 years ago, and that setup is actually more similar to coils than to leafs in terms of damping, roll rate, etc.

The Duramax is a great truck and engine, but to be honest there more than expected field failures with its Allison transmission, and that frankly surprised the heck out of me. I think they really watered down an Allison (or mostly used the name as a selling point) in the Duramax. The newer Dodges have the 545RFE automatic, and its looking very bulletproof. The chassis-cab Cummins Dodges have a monstrous iron-cased Asin automatic with PTO, similar to what's used in Hino and Fuso trucks. The old 727-based 47RH, tough as it was, really wasn't up to the torque of the mid/late 90s versions of the Cummins.

Which brings us back to the "WTF?" factor with the way Toyota marketed Tundra. Toyota *owns* most or all of Asin, so they have an HD transmission option practically in-house (and are in fact selling it to Dodge for the chassis-cabs!) If they really wanted to go after the full-size pickup and chassis-cab market, then WHY didn't they outsource a diesel with an equally good reputation and put together a heavy-duty version of the Tundra to go after market segment owned by Powerstroke Fords and Cummins Dodges? That *might* have been enough to make the Tundra a success, especially with all the problems Ford and Navistar have had with the down-sized twin-turbo Powerstrokes. I think GM has actually benefitted a lot from Ford's woes to boost Duramax sales and Toyota could have gotten in on that action. Too late now- Ford's impressive looking diesel ("Scorpion" IIRC) will be out soon, and it looks pretty good. About the only worries I'd have with it are a) the aluminum heads, and b) the choice to use urea injection for emission control. Cummins still has it beat on those issues.

It seems to me

I've got a long history of good experience with them (somewhere around 2 million miles between me and my Dad), so I've tended to stick to them. The minivans of the 90s ate transmissions like tic-tacs so I wouldn't go near one of them, but the trucks and Jeeps stayed pretty solid- even through the Daimler and Cerberus messes. I later learned that Chrysler's Jeep/Truck engineering division is fairly separate from the car/van side of things and got left alone a lot more. Despite all the mistakes the car side of the business made in the past 10 years, the trucks seemed to avoid most of it.

Reply to
Steve

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