MPX Update, Part 2: Horsepower for Heavy Hauling

Reader Contribution by Jack Mccornack
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In March I showed you a photo of MPX (MOTHER’s Pickup eXperiment) just as we’d crossed over the Oregon border. I wanted you to see the aerocap in its full glory, so I cropped out the punch line: MPX had been towing an automobile factory, all the way from Maryland.

Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration. It wasn’t a complete factory…but it was all the molds and fixtures and tools to make a Lotus 11 replica (called Kokopelli if you’re googling), and it was lashed to a twin axle car trailer and it was right up there at the rated towing capacity of this compact pickup, 3500 pounds. Plus I had plenty of cargo on board the truck itself (likely approaching the rated cargo capacity of 1640 pounds if you include the weight of Yours Truly in the front seat).

I had two reasons for subjecting myself (and MPX) to the ordeal of a coast-to-coast trip with its maximum payload. The first, of course, is I needed to get all that equipment from its home to my home, and there was a continent in the way. The second is I wanted to do some real world testing with the standard hundred-horse engine in a variety of conditions, doing real truck stuff—the sort of work that makes people buy a pickup instead of a car.

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