American Motor Files

In 1979, International Harvester was the fourth-largest company in the United States, reporting record sales of 8.4 billion dollars. Two years later, the company was restructuring 4.15 billion dollars in debt with 225 creditor banks after the longest UAW strike in union history. While the institution collapsed around them, engineers in Indianapolis finished the most overbuilt diesel V8 ever put in a civilian pickup truck. Ford Motor Company signed a 500 million dollar supply agreement for that engine, stamped their own name on the valve cover, and never mentioned International Harvester to a single buyer.

1 day ago | [YT] | 1

American Motor Files

John Deere built the 4440 between 1977 and 1982 at a factory in Waterloo, Iowa. They called it the Iron Horse. They over-engineered the frame, the castings, and the drivetrain. They rated it at 130 horsepower through the PTO shaft. Dynamometer tests regularly showed 150. John Deere's own advertising acknowledged this, noting that horsepower ratings give no indication of drawbar pull.

2 days ago | [YT] | 0

American Motor Files

If you were born before 1960, the Social Security check landing in your account may be smaller than what you actually earned. The reason is simple and almost no one knows about it: your benefit is calculated from your earnings record, and that record can contain errors going back decades — especially from the paper-reporting era of the 1970s and 1980s. The Social Security Administration does not check its own figures against what your employers reported. It pays the number it has and moves on.

4 days ago | [YT] | 0

American Motor Files

The Cummins 6BT 5.9-liter 12-valve diesel engine was designed in 1984 as an agricultural engine for Case IH row-crop tractors. Five years later, Chrysler borrowed it to save the Dodge Ram brand from extinction. Engineer Troy Simonson's original business plan called for one thousand trucks. They sold 16,750 in the first model year and had to stop taking orders. By December 1991, Dodge had assembled the one-hundred-thousandth Cummins Ram.

6 days ago | [YT] | 1

American Motor Files

The Toyota Hilux has sold over 17.3 million units in 180 countries. It is the third best-selling pickup truck on Earth. It starts at roughly $16,000 in Thailand and $22,000 in Australia. And it has not been sold in the United States since 1995. The reason traces back to a 1964 trade war over frozen chicken, a deal between a president and a union boss, and a 25% tariff that has protected the American truck market from foreign competition for over sixty years.

1 week ago | [YT] | 2

American Motor Files

The failure of the 6.0-liter Power Stroke, the 6.4-liter Power Stroke, and the first generation of DPF-equipped Duramax and Cummins trucks was not bad engineering and it was not bad luck. It was the predictable downstream consequence of an EPA enforcement action from October 1998 that forced seven diesel engine manufacturers to meet the 2004 NOx standard fifteen months ahead of schedule — and the only technology available in that timeframe was exhaust gas recirculation hardware that had not been field-proven at scale in American work trucks.

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 1

American Motor Files

In January 1995, Alan Kitzhaber drove a brand-new Kenworth T600 off the lot with a Caterpillar 3406E under the hood. He sold it in early 2025 — 4.105 million miles and three overhauls later. His mechanics never told him to replace it. The engine Caterpillar built was that good. So why did Caterpillar stop making it?

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 4

American Motor Files

Five diesel pickup trucks — the Chevy/GMC 6.2L Detroit Diesel, Ford 6.9L IDI, Ford 7.3L IDI, GM 6.5L Detroit Diesel, and first-generation Dodge Cummins 5.9L 12-valve — were built around fully mechanical injection systems with no onboard computer and no electronic diagnostic port. A trained mechanic could rebuild the entire fuel system with hand tools and a $35 seal kit. The federal compliance framework built around the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments could not accommodate that. What followed was not a named ban on mechanical injection. It was an opacity test requirement, a registration hold, and a regulatory timeline that was accelerated by a $1 billion consent decree.

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 2

American Motor Files

Ford built five engine families for war, government contracts, and industrial service. None of them were designed for American farms. All five ended up there. This video covers the full story — from the Flathead V8 that powered British military trucks in World War Two, to the GAA V8 tank engine that sold as surplus and ran grain elevators for three decades, to the 7.3-liter Power Stroke that was built to commercial bus specification and discontinued not because it failed but because a California noise ordinance made it non-compliant.

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 1

American Motor Files

In March 1969, Chrysler's NASCAR program was losing. Ford's Torino Talladega had won 30 races to the Charger 500's 18. Richard Petty had defected to Ford. The engineering team at Dodge had roughly 170 days to design, build, and race 500 street-legal homologation specials before the next season started. What they produced in that time broke the 200 mph closed-course barrier, dominated two full NASCAR seasons, and eventually forced the sanctioning body to rewrite its own rulebook. The rule worked on the track. It didn't work at Bonneville.

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 4