You know what I love? A vehicle designed to be repaired. Recently I came upon such a vehicle, a vehicle where the designers had anticipated how the vehicle would need to be repaired and incorporated access holes to remove buried parts. The vehicle was a 2005 Dodge Pickup with Cummins Turbo Diesel.
Our repair was a leaking front engine case gasket; a huge job that required removing the camshaft and rocker arms from the engine before the front case could come off. As is so common these days this large straight six cylinder engine is crammed into the short hood area with the rear two cylinders buried under the cowl. This severely limits access and makes removing the twelve inch long pushrods from the rear of the engine a physical impossibility. Well almost. Thankfully the brilliant engineers at Dodge actually anticipated this procedure and installed two rubber plugs on the bottom side of the cowl. These plugs are easily removed allowing the pushrods to be lifted out. Had these plugs not been installed the engine would have had to come out: a very, very, very time consuming and wasteful operation.
It is rare to see this level of thinking and I (and my fellow technicians) thank the Dodge truck engineering department for their foresight. These little things score big points with me and adds to my recommending Dodge diesel trucks over Ford or Chevy. For diesels they are generally the best built and most reliable of the domestic trucks.
