A remarkable amount of work has gone into today’s Nice Price or No Dice Durango to turn it into a reasonable approximation of a classic WWII WC Wagon. Let’s see if its price seems just as reasonable.
If you are going to spend less than a grand for a running, driving car, you shouldn’t be all that choosey about exactly what sort of car that might be.
Many of you complained that yesterday’s 1999 Plymouth Breeze was a bad car from the start, even before two decades of use had dulled its edge. Still, a $700 price tag is a pretty compelling argument against excitement, and that Breeze blew out of town with a narrow but decisive 55 percent Nice Price win.
Both the Breeze and its parent brand, Plymouth are long dead. Back in the day, Plymouth was Chrysler’s sensible family brand and the Breeze was that marque’s sensible family car. Such things don’t exist all that much anymore as many families have transitioned to less sensible SUVs and crossovers as their vehicles of choice.
Not one to be left out, Chrysler offers the Dodge Durango as one entrant into this crowded family hauler field. Previous generations of the Durango were based on the Dakota pickup, however, the current model shares its underpants with the uni-body Jeep Grand Cherokee and differentiates from that truck by offering the advantage of a third row of seats. As you might expect, it can be had with either two-wheel drive or AWD, and with any one of a spate of engines all the way up to the honkin’ big 5.7 liter Hemi V8.
This 2006 Dodge Durango Adventurer hails from the second generation which was built body-on-frame with a box-section chassis derived from the full-sized Ram pick up. The original bodywork shared a lot of the Ram’s looks too, what with its tapered nose and stepped fender to hood line. This one eschews all of that for an appearance that echos that of a Dodge military truck from all the way back in the mid-20th Century.
The retro work appears to be a deep dive too. The nose gets a flat front bumper with built-in which and that’s matched with flat-topped fenders, separate headlamp units, and a nose that looks like it would be at home on your granddad’s tractor.
The backend has seen some attention too. The double round tail lamps have been replaced by square projecting units and there’s a niche in the hatch for a small Jerrycan. Another winch adorns the split in the back bumper, while above that, POWER WAGON badging brackets the centrally-mounted rear window wiper. The whole thing is painted army olive green and gets topped with a basket rack and LED lights.
The truck seems to have the goods under its retro-inspired hood as well. The ad notes the mileage to be a mere 54,600 and those miles have been made possible by the truck’s 335 horsepower 5.7 liter Hemi V8.
The Mopar madness gets channeled through a five-speed automatic transmission and two-speed transfer case to all four wheels. The ad notes a towing capacity of 8,950 pounds just in case you needed to drag a house down the street or something.
With all the crazy retro work on the outside, it’s surprising to find this Durango’s interior to be completely stock. Maybe that’s a good thing since it’s a much more inviting space than any army truck ever was. You get cloth upholstery in here, along with A/C, power windows, and door locks.
The ad doesn’t note any issues with the truck, either mechanical or aesthetic so we can only assume everything works as it should.
We also have to assume that the title is clean since the seller chose to post the truck on Facebook Marketplace, the worst place to go if you want to offer more than a few sentences of description. People choose Facebook’s classifieds for their reach, but man does it suck for ad presentation.
The ad does deliver on the most important aspect of this crazy cool retro truck and that’s the price tag. The seller is asking $56,000 for it and it’s now incumbent upon you to weigh in on whether that’s a deal or not.
What do you think, is this army brat Durango worth that $56,000 asking? Or, is that just too much green for even this much olive drab?
You decide!
Facebook Marketplace out of Rochester, Michigan, or go here if the ad disappears.
H/T to Mark McIntosh for the hookup!
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