Pickup Truck Update
Pickup Truck UPDATE Advances in gasoline and diesel engines for pick-up trucks are just in time to catch the beginning of the end of the recession, the worst downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s. It's not over for millions of workers and businesses, for whom recovery is still in the future, but one aspect  improvement in new-housing starts  bodes well for truck sales, espe-cially for pickups, which closely follow that seg-ment of construction. Sales of Ford's F-150 were up enough recently that the manufacturer sched-uled extra production to keep up with demand. And the government's Cash for Clunkers program result-ed in sales of many smaller pickups that were on the qualifying list. Toyota says its Tacoma compact pick-up was among the top 10 sellers in the program. Saving fuel Of course, overall sales have been seriously down since fuel prices spiked last year and the financial crisis wounded the economy last fall. Pickups re-main popular in consumers' minds if not their spending, and sustained lower fuel prices for nearly a year have almost erased bad memories of $3 to $5 gasoline and die-sel fuel last year. Those memories are fad-ed but not forgotten, and customers continue to ask about better fuel econ-omy, manufacturers say. They are answering with refined, smaller gasoline engines:  Ford, which just an-nounced its new Power Stroke diesel for 2011-model SuperDuty trucks (see next page), offers a three-valve-per-cylinder version of its 4.6-liter V-8 that's rated at 15 mpg city, 21 highway on F-150s;  GM has applied variable Fall 2009 18