This Diesel-Powered Dodge Power Wagon is an idea More than 60 years in the making. The axles, the tires, the suspension, the winch, and even the diesel engine were all conceptualized back in the late '90s. Yet when the truck was first conceived, the diesel engine under the hood wasn't the new 6.7L Cummins, or even the tried-and-true mechanical 5.9L. It was actually a 7.2L Caterpillar engine, the predecessor to the modern C7 ACERT.
We know it may sound crazy to those of you who don't remember the retro-styled diesel Power Wagon that debuted at the Detroit Auto Show in January 1999. The Dodge/Caterpillar partnership never went beyond the concept vehicle (as far as we know), but the clean diesel technology that we all buy today owes a great deal to that stunning silver show truck.
In hindsight, the Power Wagon concept made perfect sense. Chrysler combined its 50-year-old icon of strength and utility with the latest in diesel technology to test the waters and gauge the interest in the diesels of the future. Chrysler was clearly ahead of its time, and was one of the first car companies to introduce a diesel designed for ultra-low sulfur fuel. Back then, ULSD was thought of as a "designer fuel." It was described as having a synthetic base and was created for Chrysler by a company called Syntroleum.
WORTH THE WAIT
As much as we all love clean diesel, the real story today is this '07 Dodge Ram 2500 Power Wagon with a 6.7L Cummins engine built by Mopar. For those of you not intimately familiar with this vehicle (the truck's roots date back to 1945), there's a very good reason for that. You can only buy it with the 5.7L Hemi gasoline engine. While the Hemi is a fine engine in its own right, most Diesel Power readers couldn't care less about a truck that doesn't come with a diesel under the hood.