The HD Diesel Pickup Has Attained a Level of Beastliness Bordering on Silly

From the March 2018 issue

At Deere & Company World Headquarters, the lawn is immaculate. The Deere complex in Moline, Illinois, is a midcentury Eero Saarinen masterpiece, low steel buildings hugging lushly forested hills. Nary a blade of grass is amiss. There sure would be, though, if they let me out of the showroom with the sweet model 648L grapple skidder that’s parked inside. With 756 pound-feet of torque and a ground-hugging weight of 39,340 pounds, that sucker could do some major damage in my hands. I know this because they have training simulators inside, and I did major virtual damage with every one of them. Next time you see a dump truck, check out the top portion of the dump bed. It’s probably all scarred up. Now I know why. As they say in the business, ’tis a fine dance betwixt bucket loader and dump truck, ’tis a fine dance, indeed. You hear that at job sites everywhere, just as sure as John Deere was founded by the man whose products still bear his name: Mr. Bob Tractor.

I was at Deere not because I wanted to buy a skidder—although I certainly do—but because Chevy wanted to tow some heavy stuff, and trailering excavators is much simpler than towing 20,000 pounds’ worth of live eels or Swarovski chandeliers or things like that. So we loaded up a 15,000-pound John Deere 310L backhoe on a 6000-pound Big Tex gooseneck trailer and set off down the highway in an 8000-pound Silverado 3500HD Duramax 4x4 dualie. Fans of math and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration will note that this combination of truck, trailer, and cargo far exceeds the 26,001-pound combined gross vehicle weight rating that triggers a commercial driver’s license requirement. And while I do hold a coveted international driving permit (very difficult to get, unless you walk into a AAA office and have a few minutes) as well as a license to get funky (homemade), I do not have a CDL. So a GM engineer drove.

And I gotta say, the heavy-duty diesel pickup has attained a level of beastliness that is bordering on silly. All in—truck, trailer, and the throwing stars I bought at the truck stop—our total weight must have been way past 30,000 pounds. And yet the Silverado surfed its 910 pound-feet of torque out onto the highway without causing a ripple in any fellow motorist’s morning latte. We were bouncing around something fierce, though. “The limiting factor now with trucks isn’t power,” said my chauffeur, “it’s brakes and suspension.” And licenses, I would add.

But most of us aren’t hauling a 310L. Myself, I could be happy with a tidy little 320E skid steer. As construction people say, the size of the equipment you require depends on the amount of time you have. Like, the Grand Canyon could’ve been formed by erosion rather than a million tons of dynamite if we’d been less patient. That’s the outlook I took later in the day, when we went to the Deere demo site in nearby Coal Valley: Start small and wreak havoc gradually.

The demo site is where customers try out equipment and get training. Deere has all sorts of fantastic machines there: bulldozers, excavators, road graders, and at least one giant dump truck. I decided to start with a skid steer and a pile of gravel.

Right away I discovered a design flaw, in that it doesn’t seem right that you can dump gravel on yourself, which I did. So I ripped a few zero-radius donuts and moved on to an excavator, a mid-size 160G LC. One of the John Deere guys showed me how to work the joysticks, admonished me not to move the tracks, and stepped aside to observe.

What the 160G lacks in top speed—3.3 mph—it makes up for in bucket reach. You can dig a hole 21 feet deep or dump dirt from 21 feet in the air. As it turns out, doing the latter is really fun. I’d grab a scoop, raise the arm as far as it would go, and then slowly tilt the bucket to unleash a waterfall of soil. This earned me a reprimand from my John Deere minder, who rapped on the door and yelled: “Not so high! You’re dusting us out!” Man, foreman’s always bustin’ my chops for dumpin’ too high. I can’t help it. That’s just my dig style.

He was also unimpressed when I announced “Pro move!” and started swinging the bucket sideways to brush dirt back into the hole. “Actually, that’s an amateur move,” he said. “The arm isn’t designed to work that way. It’s like pushing sideways on your elbow.” This guy didn’t demand that I turn in my hardhat, but I felt like I had two strikes. So I hopped into a nearby 210G LC, both to escape scrutiny and to revel in a bigger bucket. You know, a 160G would suit my needs, but I bet the salesman could upsell me on the 210G.

If you’ve ever wondered whether it’s fun to operate giant digging machines, I can confirm that it absolutely is. There’s something profoundly gratifying about a small human gesture, a flick of the wrist or a twitch of the foot, resulting in some action on an inhuman scale. That sense of awe also extends to towing big things, and if modern trucks seem capable beyond all reason, Deere’s toy box proved that there’s always room for improvement. Maybe next time we’ll tow a skidder.