RICHARD WILLIAMSON: Check out the new Dodge Dakota
 

If you can come up with $22,780 for the new 2008 Dakota Crew Cab, the Dodge Boys will throw in a couple of milk crates.

Not impressed? Wait until you see the crates.

Positioned under the rear seats, the containers look like nothing more than a stack of black plastic panels after you flip up the seats. Lift the top panel and each stack becomes a fully formed container anchored securely to the truck's floorboard. Push down and the crates flatten to their previous positions.

The crates provided excellent security for my groceries, particularly the 2-liter bottles of soda that tend to roll around on car seats and floorboards, gaining such explosive force that by the time you get home, you have a cola bomb in your grocery sack. This time, mine were nestled snugly in their milk crate, emitting nothing more menacing than a pleasant "spffft" upon opening.

While I tend toward skepticism in most "ease-of-use" demos, this one proved really accurate. No levers or releases to search for, no Rubik's cube schematic to interpret. Simply flip, lift and utilize.

Truck purists may gnash their teeth over such milk-crate epiphanies, but this is the kind of thing at which Chrysler excels. Just when you think every device that could ever appear on a vehicle has, the elves of Auburn Hills come up with something utterly ingenious, like the "Chill Zone" beverage cooler and drop-down liftgate speakers in the Dodge Caliber.

The real value of devices such as the crates, from a marketing standpoint, is that they grab your attention long enough that you begin to notice other distinctive traits, like the longest standard cargo bed in the class, the dual-position tailgate that can stabilize oversized objects that extend beyond the bed and the 7,500-pound towing capacity that tops the mid-size market.

As in past years, Dakota is the largest pickup in its class. That class, previously known as "small" trucks, is really more of a mid-size category, whose sales leader is the Toyota Tacoma. Dakota has about 10 percent of the market and is aiming for 12 percent with the redesigned Dakota, officials said.

Source: [url=http://www.theolympian.com/524/story/196503.html]The Olympian[/url]