RAM 1500 Hemi owners...MDS or not?

When I had a Grand Cherokee with the Hemi I would have liked to turn off MDS around suburbia even though I was only getting around 12.5 mpg. No option to turn it off back then with the six speed. If on the highway cruising long distance at 75 mph I would use MDS anyway. I recall getting around 22 mpg on interstate driving, which I thought was impressive.

It's not about mileage as much as it is about emissions. I guarantee that running MDS while cruising cut emissions by at least 30%, probably more. It's not an even 50% because they do have to change the tuning on those 4 cylinders to up the power a bit plus, there's pumping losses too. But 30-40% reduction in emissions is significant.

I have heard rumors on the Tundra forum I frequent. That the Chevy pickup engines that shut off some of the cylinders cause oil starvation in those areas and can cause catastrophic failures. Tundras are the most reliable but it comes at a cost of poor gas mileage. Peace. D

joecoulson wrote: »

I hate the fact that you cannot turn this off on GM vehicles. I purchased the Hypertech 2.0 for mostly this reason. Not to mention if you have aftermarket exhaust, it sounds awful on 4 cylinders. Waste of time IMO, and as far as the environment, the 18 wheeler's blasting out tons of smoke and fumes around here should be more of a concern than whatever gains come of the v4 mode.

Diesels are actually much cleaner than you think. Yes, some trucks that belch smoke do have issues with tuning and need to be serviced but the majority that are belching smoke are doing so because they are either cold or under heavy load or both.

OTR diesel trucks spend very little time under heavy load or cold compared to running at speed and at their peak efficiency. Most people only notice the belching smoke because big diesel trucks are not made to putter around town but that's where the average joe sees them the most. They are made to haul thousands of pounds at a reasonable speed over the road. To get that level of efficiency, you need to make some sacrifices somewhere. So if it's spending 90% of it's time at that peak efficiency than the 10% it spends reaching optimum temperatures or accelerating to highway speeds is the trade-off. Since most people that aren't truck drivers don't drive highways for extended periods on a regular basis, they only see trucks belching smoke at truck stops or driving around a town where their next drop off or pick up is. Doesn't mean they are excessive polluters, just that you're not seeing them at their peak efficiency doing what they do best.

Dabutcher wrote: »

I have heard rumors on the Tundra forum I frequent. That the Chevy pickup engines that shut off some of the cylinders cause oil starvation in those areas and can cause catastrophic failures. Tundras are the most reliable but it comes at a cost of poor gas mileage. Peace. D

I would be leery about Tundra owners giving advice/experience with Chevy trucks.

Also, quantify your statement that Tundras are the most reliable. 'Cause I guarantee you that if I actually go look up the numbers, the statistical probability will show your claim that "Tundras are the most reliable" to be nothing more than statistical margin of error and Tundras aren't any more reliable than any other brand out there. Given the production numbers of Tundras compared to Ford, GM or Dodge in regards to full-sized trucks, there's a good chance that the Tundra failure rate per production unit is significantly higher because of the lower numbers.

Just for instance, last I checked, GMC made about 233K trucks last year. The Tundra was barely half that. The Tacoma outsold it by almost 3 to 1 at about 250K units vs the Tundra's just over 100K units.

So, GM in total made 576K Chevies and 233K GMCs for a grand total of 809K trucks. Dodge made about 634K and Ford is still the king with about 874K units produced.

If you assume a 5% error rate that means that:
- GM had 11,650 bad eggs in their production run
- Toyota had 5,575 bad eggs in their production run

But the error rate is rarely the same across all brands. Those are 2019 numbers so we won't see statistics on failures until mid-2020. All we have to go on is initial purchase surveys which are garbage.

But, for example and using the numbers above, if you have 809K trucks produced with an error rate of 2.08%, that's about 16,830 vehicles that were duds. Compare that to 111,500 trucks produced with about 6700 being duds, it's only 40% of the errors that GM had but, that's an error rate of 6.01%. So per unit, for every 100 trucks, you have 6 bad Tundras compared to the every 100 GMs you only have 2 bad trucks. The GMs out number the Tundras because of sheer production levels, not because they less reliable. For every 1 Tundra made, GM made 7+ trucks. In the odds of all production numbers, your chances of hitting a bad GM are better than hitting a bad Toyota but, that doesn't mean the Toyota is more reliable. It just means there are less of them. Statistically, if you're just looking at Toyotas, you have a better chance at hitting a bad Toyota than if you were just looking at GMs and hitting a bad GM.

When you factor in market share, though, and you decide to go and survey owners to see who has a broken truck and is isn't happy with it, if your sample size isn't large enough, you have a good chance of getting Ford, GM, Dodge and Toyota owners in your survey but due to market share, not just nationally but regionally, you have a statistically better chance of finding dissatisfied Ford, Dodge and GM owners than you do Toyota, Nissan and Honda solely because any one of "The Big 3" outproduces all of "The Small 3" combined in any given year.

So anecdotal evidence and spun statistical reporting doesn't make a Tundra fanboy forum the defacto standard on Chevy reliability issues. It just means that the comparatively few Tundra owners out there found a place to hang out together. But, the number of Tundra owners is far too small to be considered a viable population size when surveying in regards to Ford, Dodge or GM. Last year, Ford, Dodge and GM sold 2.35M trucks, combined. Toyota sold about 111,500 Tundras. That's not even 5% of the total trucks from the competition and that doesn't even include Honda and Nissan numbers. And even if you included the 250K Tacoma buyers, you'd still only have about 15% for a sample size in total. That's a significant sample size in numbers but not really a significant size statistically speaking. Especially since that sample size could be skewed regionally. Like California would have significantly higher density of Toyota buyers while, Oklahoma would be more likely to be Ford/Chevy heavy. So with a total sample size of about 362K Toyota owners on a national level, a survey in California could push Toyota's market share into double digits with 20-30% instead of 15% but in Oklahoma, there could be so few Toyotas that they'd have single digit or even a fraction of a percent of market share and neither situation would be indicative of the whole 3M+ full-sized truck market.

So yeah, unless you go to a Chevy forum and see a significant number of new Chevy truck owners complaining about the Chevy version of MDS lunching engines inside the first year, saying that Chevys are doing so and Tundras are the most reliable because a small subset of the already small subset of the Tundra owners said so is just shenanigans.

joecoulson wrote: »

Ok. Forget 18 wheeler’s, how about cow flatulence?

EAT MOAR COW!

An irony is the cylinder deactivation systems which have been in the field for many years may be more reliable than the new stuff being used for fuel economy like small engines with heavily boosted turbos, high pressure fuel injection, and mild hybrid 48 volt systems. Lexus and Toyota recalling 700,000 recent model vehicles for bad fuel pumps may be one sign of trouble to come.

Nightfall wrote: »

I feel like the move to turbo, direct injection, high PSI fuel should have been done slower with more R&D. "We" had naturally aspirated and port injection down pat.

Yeah, I am leery of the long-term reliability of the small displacement turbos -- admittedly, this is based on the past eccentricities of turbochargers in passenger cars. There's a history of them self-destructing in entertaining and expensive ways in several brands of motorcar that I can think of (Saab, e.g.)

My theory : the world's auto manufactures got so good at building hyper-reliable I/C engines (I'm lookin' at you, Honda ) that they shot themselves in the foot in terms of selling new cars. Easy fix: re-introduce some planned obsolescence into the heart of your products.

Oh, and them there modern, multi-speed, multi-clutch automatic transmissions. Those are gonna last 300k miles, I'm sure...

Dabutcher wrote: »

Check resale values for trucks. Reliability and resale value go hand in hand. Peace. D

oh... those used Tundras sure do hold their value, don't they?

Dabutcher wrote: »

I have heard rumors on the Tundra forum I frequent. That the Chevy pickup engines that shut off some of the cylinders cause oil starvation in those areas and can cause catastrophic failures. Tundras are the most reliable but it comes at a cost of poor gas mileage. Peace. D

@Dabutcher, I frequent the same forums as I purchased a 2019 tundra crewmax trd off-road in June after my 4runner was totaled by a guy running a red light. There is no fanboy here I assure you but after years of owning Toyota’s, the safety and reliability are the reasons why I will continue to purchase Toyota offerings. My 4runner had been paid off, north 100k miles and was 58 months old when it was totaled. I got over 75% of what I PAID FOR IT as insurance settlement.

People can spin the numbers all they want, and it’s true the tundra has its issue with fuel economy. Rumor is they are scrapping the v8 for a turbo v6 in the near future across all truck platforms. I will kindly take my v8, drive it like a grandpa and appreciate the fact that when I tow and haul (which we do often with our camper) I have the necessary get up and go. And whenever I decide to sell it, I KNOW I will be getting an elevated ROI compared to other models.

Wife drives a rav4, I have driven a 4runner, Camry and corolla, and daughter drives a 4runner. Peace of mind with safety, reliability and resale are worth its weight in gold to me.....

@jstas, if you want a laugh you should see the service records from my 2005 Nissan titan. That spent more days in the shop than driving it, had many of the major parts replaced and still didn’t run right. Couldn’t use 4wd for over a year while they diagnosed the issue and lost my shirt on resale. ALL makes have their problems, but Toyota, in my experience, has far fewer and when they do the company is known to make it right.

Dabutcher wrote: »

Check resale values for trucks. Reliability and resale value go hand in hand. Peace. D

No, they don't.

BMWs are notoriously unreliable after about 3 years yet they retain value.

Additionally, to get back to trucks, anything with a diesel will retain an absurd amount of value yet there are only a select few with very specific engines that are actually reliable. The rest are just torque monsters with lots of power but no more reliable than your average gas engine. They cost 3 times as much to fix when they break too. But, the "diesel tax" exists because of people like you that buy into the hype and refuse to look past the lipstick on the pig.

shawn474 wrote: »

@jstas, if you want a laugh you should see the service records from my 2005 Nissan titan. That spent more days in the shop than driving it, had many of the major parts replaced and still didn’t run right. Couldn’t use 4wd for over a year while they diagnosed the issue and lost my shirt on resale. ALL makes have their problems, but Toyota, in my experience, has far fewer and when they do the company is known to make it right.

I'm not laughing at anything. I'm saying that your experience is an illusion. Toyota doesn't deserve the reputation it gets for reliability because the numbers don't show it. Places like Consumer Reports poll people, they don't extract hard numbers from manufacturers. J.D. Power is the same way. They talk to people who have already bought into the hype and it's been shown that those people are more willing to overlook problems that they would gladly throw any other company under the bus for and call them crap for it.

Fan: You know, I had my Buick for 6 years and the window switch broke on it! Do you believe that? I mean, seriously Buick, get it together! Anyway, after that I was DONE with Buick. Everyone says those Japanese jobs are more reliable so I bought a Toyota and haven't looked back!
Surveyor: Have you had any issues with your Toyota?
Fan: None!
Surveyor: Well, the service records we got from your dealer show that you had your Toyota in for a repair. What was that for?
Fan: Oh, that, yeah. About 7 months in, the window switch broke. Had to get it repaired but it was probably my fault, pushed it too hard or something. No big deal, Toyota fixed it under warranty.
Surveyor: Did Buick fix the window switch for you?
Fan: NO!
Surveyor: They refused?
Fan: Well, no, they didn't, I just had to pay for it. They said it was out of warranty.
Surveyor: So what do you do for a living?
Fan: Oh, I'm a medical coder.
Surveyor: How far away from work do you live?
Fan: Oh, work is about 5 miles away but I work from home often too.
Surveyor: How did you rack up...let's see here...yeah, you said you put 21,000 miles on your car in a year?
Fan: Oh, I deliver newspapers in the morning for extra cash.
Surveyor: Oh, so you use your windows a lot?
Fan: Yeah, especially when it's cold out! Can't throw papers through a closed window!

That's the kind of silliness you get talking to people for your surveys and then trying to hold those opinion surveys up as statistically accurate. Believe me, I went through this in college helping out grad students to do public surveys for course credit. We had to throw out half of our study data because of absurdity like the above. That guy's Buick held it together for 6 years before his above average use of the window switch caused a failure. The Toyota lasted 7 months. But the Toyota is more reliable because everyone said so? How does that work? Why is this chode refusing to look at his reality as valid experience but believes everyone else's anecdotal evidence, likely shrouded by the same silliness he exhibits, is gospel?

When you look at the hard numbers, and they are out there, Toyota and subsequently Lexus, are middle of the pack for reliability. Half of the GM brands score higher as well as Mazda, Subaru, Honda/Acura and VW. That's because the numbers are based on actual service/repair records, recall efforts and vehicle registration data with statistical analysis reports comparing those stats. Not on phone calls to fanboys that will gladly expound upon their favorite brand ad nauseum.

Just because your experience is good doesn't mean it's indicative of the entire population. Just because 10,000 people made the same choice and say the same thing doesn't mean they can't be wrong either. You have had a good experience with Toyotas and a bad experience with Nissans. I can give 5 other people I know personally who will gladly tell you that you are a joker and know nothing because their Nissans have been trouble free for many years. One of those Nissan owners has a brand new Tacoma...well, it's 2 years old right now. He has a new one because Toyota had to buy his old Tacoma from him because the frame was so rusted it was not repairable. They essentially had to remove the entire truck from the frame and suspension and replace the frame and the front end suspension to fix the rust issue. It was cheaper and less liability for Toyota to just give him FMV for his bad Tacoma and sell him a new one at a fraction of the MSRP to cover their asses. He told me he's basically holding on to it until the warranty is out and then he's going to sell it and go find an old Chevy C/K Silverado instead. I'm sure his opinions would contradict yours completely.

Jstas wrote: »

Dabutcher wrote: »

Check resale values for trucks. Reliability and resale value go hand in hand. Peace. D

No, they don't.

BMWs are notoriously unreliable after about 3 years yet they retain value.

Additionally, to get back to trucks, anything with a diesel will retain an absurd amount of value yet there are only a select few with very specific engines that are actually reliable. The rest are just torque monsters with lots of power but no more reliable than your average gas engine. They cost 3 times as much to fix when they break too. But, the "diesel tax" exists because of people like you that buy into the hype and refuse to look past the lipstick on the pig.

shawn474 wrote: »

@jstas, if you want a laugh you should see the service records from my 2005 Nissan titan. That spent more days in the shop than driving it, had many of the major parts replaced and still didn’t run right. Couldn’t use 4wd for over a year while they diagnosed the issue and lost my shirt on resale. ALL makes have their problems, but Toyota, in my experience, has far fewer and when they do the company is known to make it right.

I'm not laughing at anything. I'm saying that your experience is an illusion. Toyota doesn't deserve the reputation it gets for reliability because the numbers don't show it. Places like Consumer Reports poll people, they don't extract hard numbers from manufacturers. J.D. Power is the same way. They talk to people who have already bought into the hype and it's been shown that those people are more willing to overlook problems that they would gladly throw any other company under the bus for and call them crap for it.

Fan: You know, I had my Buick for 6 years and the window switch broke on it! Do you believe that? I mean, seriously Buick, get it together! Anyway, after that I was DONE with Buick. Everyone says those Japanese jobs are more reliable so I bought a Toyota and haven't looked back!
Surveyor: Have you had any issues with your Toyota?
Fan: None!
Surveyor: Well, the service records we got from your dealer show that you had your Toyota in for a repair. What was that for?
Fan: Oh, that, yeah. About 7 months in, the window switch broke. Had to get it repaired but it was probably my fault, pushed it too hard or something. No big deal, Toyota fixed it under warranty.
Surveyor: Did Buick fix the window switch for you?
Fan: NO!
Surveyor: They refused?
Fan: Well, no, they didn't, I just had to pay for it. They said it was out of warranty.
Surveyor: So what do you do for a living?
Fan: Oh, I'm a medical coder.
Surveyor: How far away from work do you live?
Fan: Oh, work is about 5 miles away but I work from home often too.
Surveyor: How did you rack up...let's see here...yeah, you said you put 21,000 miles on your car in a year?
Fan: Oh, I deliver newspapers in the morning for extra cash.
Surveyor: Oh, so you use your windows a lot?
Fan: Yeah, especially when it's cold out! Can't throw papers through a closed window!

That's the kind of silliness you get talking to people for your surveys and then trying to hold those opinion surveys up as statistically accurate. Believe me, I went through this in college helping out grad students to do public surveys for course credit. We had to throw out half of our study data because of absurdity like the above. That guy's Buick held it together for 6 years before his above average use of the window switch caused a failure. The Toyota lasted 7 months. But the Toyota is more reliable because everyone said so? How does that work? Why is this chode refusing to look at his reality as valid experience but believes everyone else's anecdotal evidence, likely shrouded by the same silliness he exhibits, is gospel?

When you look at the hard numbers, and they are out there, Toyota and subsequently Lexus, are middle of the pack for reliability. Half of the GM brands score higher as well as Mazda, Subaru, Honda/Acura and VW. That's because the numbers are based on actual service/repair records, recall efforts and vehicle registration data with statistical analysis reports comparing those stats. Not on phone calls to fanboys that will gladly expound upon their favorite brand ad nauseum.

Just because your experience is good doesn't mean it's indicative of the entire population. Just because 10,000 people made the same choice and say the same thing doesn't mean they can't be wrong either. You have had a good experience with Toyotas and a bad experience with Nissans. I can give 5 other people I know personally who will gladly tell you that you are a joker and know nothing because their Nissans have been trouble free for many years. One of those Nissan owners has a brand new Tacoma...well, it's 2 years old right now. He has a new one because Toyota had to buy his old Tacoma from him because the frame was so rusted it was not repairable. They essentially had to remove the entire truck from the frame and suspension and replace the frame and the front end suspension to fix the rust issue. It was cheaper and less liability for Toyota to just give him FMV for his bad Tacoma and sell him a new one at a fraction of the MSRP to cover their asses. He told me he's basically holding on to it until the warranty is out and then he's going to sell it and go find an old Chevy C/K Silverado instead. I'm sure his opinions would contradict yours completely.

As usual, this have devolved into a jstas lecture about how he is right and everyone else is wrong.....I will tap out after saying that my experience may be an “illusion”, but it’s fact that I haven’t had to do any major repairs out of warranty on ANY Toyota that i have owned. Oil changes, brakes, tires and an occasional door lock actuator. My parents have the same experience. My neighbor does as well, with Lexus and Toyota. So I guess I should say my personal experience with the brand and dealerships has been exceptional and something I am not yet willing to risk with another car company. Your story reinforces the fact that Toyota stands by their product and will make things right - even when other manufacturers wouldn’t. They have had rust issues with their frames in the past and decided to extend the warranty WELL past the scheduled warranty expired. ALL manufacturers have their issues; not all stand by their product the way Toyota has. Simply my opinion and first hand 30 years of Toyota car buying experience.

At the end of 2011 I was looking for a new vehicle to replace a 2003 Infiniti that was produced back when Nissan used to make good vehicles. I sat in a Toyota Highlander and thought, wow this has all the personality of a toaster. Didn't even bother to test drive it. Ended up buying a fully loaded Jeep Grand Cherokee with the Hemi. Owned that for four years. After half a dozen recalls for things that could have proven deadly and the dashboard peeling apart I dumped it. I really enjoyed the performance and drivetrain while I had it, but in retrospect if I had bought the Toyota appliance I would likely still have it. Should have leased the Jeep and bailed out earlier instead of buying it. My boss at the time bought a Highlander when I bought the Jeep and he still has his with zero problems.

The reliability of MDS on the Grand Cherokee never became an issue for me because so much else fell apart on it. The powertrain seemed to be bulletproof despite needing to bypass the engine management system in a recall though.

mrbigbluelight wrote: »

As usual, this have devolved into a jstas lecture about how he is right and everyone else is wrong....
Well, you can't argue against his facts.

.....as usual. 😇

Personally I love his delve in to things, It had me laughing out loud at lunch today. In reality it's HOW you ask the question not what question was asked. The gent answered the question but the follow up questions got to the meat of his answer which in reality wasn't exactly truthful, yet wasn't a lie....

Tom