5th PlaceZabhawkin, O11 - 734.03 Points
The sun was just beginning to crest over the vast expanse of pine trees that make up the barrens surrounding the farmland of southern New Jersey. We were standing squarely in Blue Anchor, NJ at the original headquarters of Boss Motorsports. I had just been handed a set of keys to our 5th place vehicle following the tallying of our testers' reviews. I walked out to the stiffly packed down dirt of our packing house lot where many semi-trucks, tractors, and, of course, pickups had passed thousands of times, packing down the dirt into a believable substitute for concrete under my work-worn boots. Sitting there was the first truck I was to operate over this weekend of reviews. As I unlocked the truck, all I could really say about my first impression is that the truck struck me as rugged. It's not the first truck I've called that, and it certainly will not be the last. It looked like it had been purposely built for work. You could sense that this truck knew it would only get washed when it rained; that it was designed to drive through the rough, be scratched, dinged, and nicked in a good day's work, and not look the slightest bit worn from the efforts.
Under the hood I found a perfectly square, all cast-iron 5L V8 with a 4-valve DOHC set-up. On paper it made 323 HP @ 6500 RPM and 318 Ft-Lbs of torque @ 3800 RPM with a redline at 7000 revs. I laughed to myself when I read the bore and stroke measurement of 3.65" x 3.65" noting that it was identical in stroke and 0.02" of bore different from Ford's Coyote V8 design. Whether this was intended or not, I was not surprised by the choice to utilize this design in particular. Hey, if you can't beat them, make your engine incrementally bigger than theirs just to have bragging rights in true American automotive fashion, then join them. The 5.0 Coyote is one we at Boss Motorsports are very familiar with. I resisted the urge to tune the motor before I drove it, and decided to start her up so that I could get moving.
Before getting in, I did a brief walk around. This truck had a decent sized crew-cab, massive wheels, and a nice large bed that left plenty of room to load her up, while still being able to close the tailgate, which I truly appreciate. This truck screamed traditional design with MacPherson Struts upfront, a solid axle and leaf springs in the rear, and a completely steel body on frame construction. The chassis was AHS steel and the panels corrosion resistant to ensure that the mud, stones, and dirt we would encounter would have a hard time rotting this beast away. So far, I hadn't been surprised, except for the gargantuan 335/70R17 front and 395/60R17 rear tires. I was glad I wouldn't have this truck long enough to replace them, and seriously wondered about where one would store a spare, but I knew there was no curb, hill, or uneven terrain that could stop me.
Inside the truck I was all smiles. 6 seats with enough room for the whole crew (like day-laborer, union-having crew, not size-of-a-12-year-old crew), with premium material, premium infotainment, and power steering, ABS, and traction control surrounded you in a comfortable setting to get to and from your work locations. I wouldn't mind being in and out of this truck all day long. The quality wasn't anything to write home about, but it was sufficiently robust to match the rugged exterior. I don't think the interior would last as long as the body and frame of the truck, or take nearly as much abuse, but it certainly wasn't going to start giving you issues as soon as the warranty expired. It was a work truck after all, you could only expect so much. Safety seemed to be the one area where the O11 (that's Oh-11 by the way, not Zero-11) wasn't winning any awards however. There were the standard front airbags on both sides, good seat belts, and plenty of truck on all sides of you, but rollover risk seemed to be worrisome with 5786.3 lbs of weight and a very stiff frame that certainly wasn't likely to give way during a collision. There was going to be plenty of energy coming through the passenger compartment, and I wish some rugged safety had been placed inside. Resolving to not do any aggressive cornering, I set off.
My first observation was that the truck was very easy to turn. I was worried about cranking the wheel with the monstrous front tires and relatively small rims. I was certain you could unseat the tires if you forgot to keep your pressures up since there was so much sidewall. I laughed at the thought of people actually going out to find bigger tires to put on this truck. I passed people in lifted trucks who probably thought 35.433" tires were still just too small, but that certainly wasn't me. Once I got it out onto the road and pointed straight, I let her have it. She didn't give me much back though.
This thing is winning precisely 0.0 sportiness awards. I was practically leaning forward in my seat trying to get the thing to pick up the pace. I went through 5 of the 7 gears on my way to 60 MPH. That's absurd. 7th gear wasn't even fully overdrive, which explained the 10.6 MPG I was getting on my LCD display. I knew this truck had the displacement and rev range to make some decent power. I was left disappointed. It took 9.3 seconds to hit 60 MPH and an absolutely embarrassing 6.8 seconds to get up to 75 MPH from 50 which made overtaking on these two lane country roads impossible. It was lethargic enough to make any fleet manager happy and to make "How's my driving?" stickers useless when it came to speed. The truck had a theoretical top speed of 108.8 MPH, but I didn't have enough tarmac or free time to get there.
Gripes about speed and acceleration aside, you were wishing to get into trouble if you ventured above 20 MPH on even the smoothest dirt road of my farm back in the day. Therefore, I wasn't concerned about not being able to move the speedometer needle much. What I was concerned with was how was the truck designed when it came to handling the rugged trails of the Pine Barrens and Wharton State Forest. So once I got deep into the pines and out past the ghost town of Batsto Village, I hit a trail and I hit it hard. I had some preconceived notions about this truck and offroading, and I wasn't wrong. On paper, it was third highest in offroad capabilities coming with skid-trays standard for when those 35" tires somehow didn't give you enough clearance. I might as well have been in a monster truck. This thing was a blast in the dirt. The short gears kept me in the high end of the power band and the wide tires helped me blast through the loose sandy trails. Mud bogs and standing water were no match for the O11 as it simply owned everything in front of it.
Sadly, I had to get back on the road and do some real-world testing. Back at the farm we had a trailer loaded with 8,000 lbs. of dead weight. We hooked up, connected our safety chains, and plugged in all of our towing lights and we set off. The truck was nicely designed to accept various plug designs for trailer lights and even came with trailer brake controls. With 4 short tons hooked up, the short gears proved useful again and the 0-60 time didn't really slack off much (although how much longer could it get before she stalled during a shift), even with the weight of the overall vehicle more than doubled. The practically flat torque curve really made its presence known with a load hooked up. Amazingly, it wasn't any harder to drive. The mirrors were large enough to look back, the brakes were over sized to provide excellent stopping power when empty and plenty of effort when heavily loaded. I wasn't afraid of someone cutting me off or a light changing in front of me. This truck did the hard work well. Not to mention, the springs barely sagged when we dropped 1000 lbs of payload as far back as we could in the bed. This thing was as tough as it looked.
So that leads us to ask, why second? Well, have you ever heard of the phrase "second to none"? Well let's just call this truck "second to one" in just about every category. It was truly an amazing truck, but the O11's enemy was its overall goodness limiting its potential greatness. It was the second most utilitarian, third most practical and offroad ready, and the second most drivable of the Top-5. It just wasn't the best at anything, and the competition up here warrants at least one area of exceptionalism, especially when you tank in sportiness, struggle in safety, and are low in reliability by the competition standards. Then, add the fact that the quality of everything on this truck was completely average, but it was designed and engineered to extract every possible point out of those average components. For that, the O11 is rewarded with a relatively low $32,340 MSRP. Don't get me wrong. This thing is probably one of the best trucks you can get for under $33,000. It's loaded. It's good quality. It's fun to drive. A couple more bucks could have brought safety up to more acceptable levels and, maybe, have gotten sportiness out of the basement and a worst-tested 0.0 numerical score, but that leaves folks like us at Boss Motorsports room to tinker. If you're looking for a cheap, nice, and utilitarian vehicle, the O11 is for you. For those reasons, it's the 5th best truck you can buy according to our metrics. A well deserved position indeed.
Thu Jan 14, 2016 1:19 pm 
, will fix it asap 
Re: The Farm Truck Challenge (5th Place Announced)
