Those crazy Chevy marketing guys are at it again. Here they have a ’72 Chevy pickup pulling a 460,000-lb Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet. Watch this.
This video is another piece of a Chevy marketing campaign in the early ’70s we featured a little while back at Mac’s Motor City Garage. In the previous spot, a ’73 pickup pulled a 178-ton load of logs in Montana timber country (watch it here). The Chevrolet people pulled off a whole series of towing stunts in this series, the better to convince you buyers that their trucks were tough—a gimmick still used in pickup commercials to this day. In this chapter, a ’72 Chevy 3/4-ton is pulling a Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet borrowed from American Airlines—all 460,00 lbs of it.
The pickup is a KE20 with an 8-ft bed and standard four-wheel drive, a 350 cubic-inch small-block V8 with 175 SAE net horsepower, and a Turbo-Hydramatic 400 automatic transmission (A moment of silence for the torque converter, please). Back in those days, the automakers didn’t have an established rating system for towing capacity, but whatever the limit might be for this pickup, we can be sure it was exceeded here.
It’s interesting to reflect that when this campaign was produced in the early ’70s, Ford and Chevy were tussling over the top spot in U.S. pickup sales, and now half a century later, the same two manufacturers are still fighting it out. (Ford is usually number one but when Chevy and GMC sales are combined, GM wins.) The big difference today is that pickups are now the best-selling vehicles overall in the United States. Video follows.
These stunts don’t prove anything at all, but they’re fun to watch.
Those Chevy truck stunts that they featured in their commercials would’ve been even more impressive if they’d unhooked the trucks from their loads, and then gone on to drive the trucks for another 1,000 additional, trouble-free miles.
But as you hinted at in the statement about the THM400’s torque converter, I have a feeling those additional, trouble-free miles never came to be.
“A moment of silence for the torque converter, please.” LOL
Depending on how much power was applied to the torque converter, it could of gotten REALLY HOT and/or it swelled and opened up the clearances inside while pushing back towards the pump and started to block the fluid flow from the pump.
Even you or me, on a bicycle, could tow a 747 if the slope of the pavement was just right, so that the static friction of the plane was enough to keep it still, but the downslope enough to overcome dynamic friction while moving. Of course, stopping the plane in that same situation would be a disastrous impossibility. Other factors to consider are that “450,000 lb” implies near zero passengers and empty fuel tanks. There’s no point in letting a 747 take off without 200,000-300,000 lb of those on board too.
a physics-take on a different pickup-ad brag I’ve seen – Ford made one a few years ago showing an F150 going down a test track paved with left / right / left… sideways railroad ties – bump bump bump – supposedly demonstrating a lot less torsional oscillation of the truck frame and bed, compared to a Toyota Tundra. The unstated truth, I’m pretty sure, is that this kind of torsional resonance of any vehicle varies a lot with speed, and has a critical worst-case speed. Presto, all they needed to do was film the Toyota at its worst speed, and the Ford not.