I was fortunate enough to wheel with the Mopar engineering group in Moab on the Steelbender trail. Never have I wheeled with $1 million dollar concepts and never have I wheeled with them WITHOUT A CAMERA in our entire group!!! Grr... The first spy shots weren't even out yet!

My favorite of the trip tho was this lil gem:
http://blogs.jpmagazine.com/6659709/...tos/index.html

It has a VM Motori 2.8-liter 4-cylinder turbo diesel, a 3.8:1 Atlas, 5.13:1 Dynatrac axles and rolls on 37's. We were not impressed with the driver's attitude problem and ego but I guess when you are in driving a hand built $150,000 one of a kind and everyone looks at you with envy... it might stand to reason.

Also on the trail was a 4-door Wrangler on 44's with Mopar's yet-to-be released portal axles - I was surprised to see them entering that niche market but of course they will be around $12,000 a piece! They are also really wide. Of course, no pics, not even spy pics yet! BTW, all those engineers were driving these one-off prototypes and most have never even been on a trail before. We learned a stripped version of the Rubicon will be available soon with basic steel wheels, bare interior, and no frills! The Dodge Powerwagon concept (the third one perhaps anyway) was out there too - I liked it. They took a 1-ton Dodge Ram dually and cut the frame down and trimmed out the bed sides to create a short flareside bed out of it - it was on 40's... I dug it!

http://blogs.jpmagazine.com/6656514/...gon/index.html

And for my Jeep hatin VX brothers... there was an XJ with all the Mopar accessories on it - tube doors, wheels, seats, all this Mopar stuff to advertise the whole XJ offering. The problem... same as a VX, they burnt up a lot of oil and we had to give them a quart to get by. 1-million dollars of Mopar stuff and concepts and no spare oil!

GOOD TIMES! Dan Mick is also really quirky and nice... he gave us Twizzlers!