edbehnke wrote:
differences?
cost about $5-8K more - Not true for the RAM, $4,600 upgrade over pentastar motor (Gas V6), $2,800 upgrade over the HEMI motor. Depends on where you measure from.
oil changes more expensive - This will be true, Seems like oil cost per quart is bouncing between $7 and $9 bucks a quart online. The VM Motori motor uses about 10 quarts of oil and it has a special rating, ACEA C3, which most US oils don't meet. Got to go online to buy the oil
fuel costs anywhere from .50-1.00 more - Not true across the whole country. This depends on your locale. In my neck of the woods, Diesel is once again the cheapest fuel undercutting regular gas by up to a dime, or costs the same as regular unleaded
mileage will be "a little" better - I don't know about a little. Depends on what you base it off of. Are you comparing against the Pentastar? Or the HEMI? If you compare against the pentastar motor, then fuel economy improvement you're looking at is roughly 16% or 17% fuel economy benefit. If you compare against the HEMI, then you're looking at 29% fuel economy benefit. Again this depends on your baseline.
FuelEconomy.gov
As for additional maintenance. The Fuel filter is extremely cheap on the Ecodiesel. Went to Geno's out of curiosity and was extremely jealous of the $28 fuel filter. The HD diesels currently run between 80 and 100 bucks for a fuel filter kit on a Superduty or RAM HD.
VM Motori diesel requires oil changes once a year or every 10,000 miles. This seems to be the case for the HEMI as well. So with the diesel, in the case of the 1500, you have the added maintenance of changing a fuel filter about once a year and currently pricier oil changes due to the requirements of the VM Motori motor. It's too bad we can't just use some good ol' shell Rotella T6 or Delo 400LE Synthetic. However, the oil filter itself is a pricey piece of kit, hitting about 50 bucks on Geno's(most expensive oil filter I've ever seen). Hopefully prices will come down over time.
What you don't have is spark plug changes at 100k miles, but it's almost a non-issue since most owners trade their vehicles out at that point. Spark plugs are also cheap, just a pain to get access to, especially on a HEMI motor (What you pay mostly on those spark plug changes are labor rates).
The VM Motori also uses old-school solenoid activated injectors which are far cheaper and proven reliable over the long haul. So the injectors should easily last over 300k miles. The only concern I'd have over the fuel system is that it does seem to use the legendary Bosch CP4 which has been known to have issues in the Ford and Chevy vehicles. However, Bosch builds these pumps to the specs of the vendors so I don't know if this will be an issue on the VM Motori. Only time will tell.
As for DEF consumption. If you buy it bulk from the trucker's areas at 2.80 a gallon, you're essentially adding a nickel per gallon of diesel on your total liquid consumption. If you buy from say the jugs at Walmart where it averages about 5 or 6 dollars a gallon, you're adding 10 cents per gallon of diesel for running costs. I personally bought a few containers and refill them along with my truck at the trucker fuel stops when I'm passing by. That way I don't have to make many trips and I can keep my DEF topped off.
