We Explain Why Jeep Gladiator, Chevy Colorado ZR2 Frames Bent

Hey, if you've seen the photos of the bent frames going around the internet, and you want to know the real engineering answers behind what's going on, I got them. I got two engineers in this video lending me their expertise on what they think is going on with these bent frames. I'm going to tell you what they think, and I'm going to add some of my thoughts in the end. We're going to start it on that right now. Hey, it's Tim, Pickup Truck Plus SUV talk. This is your first time on the channel? Welcome. On this channel, you'll find truck and SUV news, reviews, real-world stories, and you'll find interesting stories like this one. Like I said, in this video, I'm going to talk about these two trucks that we have bent frames. We have a Jeep Gladiator with a bent frame, and we have a Chevy Colorado ZR2 with a bent frame. You've probably seen my other videos on this, which I'll link above and put them on the end, that talk about what the shop said about it, what the dealership said about it as far as the insurance claims of the Colorado ZR2. I really want to dive more into what the engineers think, so I've reached out to two of them. First one's going to be Dan Edmonds. He's got a long list of experience from suspension and from experience doing suspension tuning with Toyota. He's done a lot of this stuff over the years. He's done some Jeep Wranglers off-road. He's done off-roading trips. He's going to talk a lot about the environment where this is at, and he's going to talk a lot about what's going on with suspension when you go over the hills and give his thoughts. The second guy I'm going to reference is, I'm going to talk for him. Unfortunately, I can't say his name. It's going to be anonymous. I can tell you that he's a well-known engineer with another truck maker. He lent me his experience and his expertise looking at the photos, and I'm going to talk about the frame in that one, because he gave me some really good information on the frame, why it has holes, and why the truck's bent that way. Let's first start with Dan Edmonds, and I'll play the interview I just had with him on Skype right now. All right, so like I said in the intro, I'm bringing my experts in. My friend, Dan Edmonds, is here. Dan Edmonds, I'm going to let him talk about his background, but you see from the photo behind him with Ivan Stewart-Sandoz, he's had a lot of experience off-roading. Dan, tell us a little bit about your background and what you've been doing as far as suspension and your history. Yeah, yeah. I mean, for the last 14 years, people know me from Edmonds.com, no relation, where I reviewed vehicles and ran the testing department, where all the vehicles were brought in for rating and ranking and all of that. But before that, the reason I got the job at Edmonds is I worked at Toyota for 10 years and Hyundai for almost six, doing suspension development. And at Toyota in particular, that was really laser-focused on trucks and SUVs, the Tacoma TRD off-road package, the Prerunner, the first Tundra, the first Sequoia. I was involved in development of all of those, and that included mainly suspension, but that gets into towing and off-road use, which are both relevant here. Right. And you're in Southern California. You've done off-road in Mojave, you've done the Death Valley, you've done this kind of stuff before. Yeah. Mojave isn't a marketing term. It's just a place over the mountains that I go to all the time. No. A little further from the Rubicon Trail, the Mojave Desert is right here. Right. And I'm going to put a couple photos on the screen, but you've sent me that you've actually had a Wrangler and you've towed that trailer. So there's a couple things going on. We have a Jeep Gladiator and a Chevy Colorado ZR2 that have both had bent frames. They have very similar trailers, very similar overland, I guess, is an overused term, but they're basically a tent on a trailer. Adventure trailers, if you want to not say the O word. I know. I have a problem with the O word. It's like too much marketing. But so we have these two mid-sized trucks that have got these bent frames. And with your experience, and take a look at this stuff, we have both owners have said, and one was a shop and was the owner, said it was aftermarket that that's why the warranty was denied. One said the tire was too big. The other one said the shocks were too big. You've seen the pictures. We haven't really got more detailed pictures. They don't really respond to my emails and responses back for whatever reason. But I mean, what do you think when you see this stuff? Yeah, I mean, it's really hard to really blame a big tire or a shock. I'm not completely convinced of that, but I can't rule it out because obviously I'm not looking at the frame like somebody else might have and actually looking at specifics of where it's bent. But from what I can tell, especially with the Gladiator, that truck's shocks lean forward into the cab, which is the opposite of the Wrangler, which goes back towards the back bumper. And it looks to me like all of the bending happened after the shock mount and where the links attached to the frame and that five-link suspension that it has. But again, can't rule it out. It just seems like if something bottomed out and the shock was too long, shock absorber's a nice flimsy little shaft compared to a frame. So it's really hard to envision the weak link being the frame, and especially considering where the bend is, kind of behind where all that stuff seems to intersect. So I mean, when I think about this, I looked at the picture of the Gladiator and immediately was like, oh, that looks like the Mojave Road. And I know the Mojave Road, and the Mojave Road isn't the kind of off-road trail that requires low range, it's not a rock-crawling thing. It's a desert kind of tour. It really is an overlanding trail, and the trailer that's being used is not uncommon on that trail. But the trail has a lot of whoops. I mean, a lot of whoop-de-doos are present in the Mojave Desert, other places where motorcycles and off-road vehicles and side-by-sides all coexist. It seems like the motorcycles, the passage of them creates these big whoops. And then if you're driving in a jeep or something like that, or a pickup truck, you have to kind of be careful of your speed, unless you've got like a Baja-style trophy truck. Because you just don't have the suspension travel to deal with the depth of the whoops, and so, you know, even when you're not towing, you know, a lot of viewers and you yourself might have remembered situations where you're going along, and then all of a sudden you're surprised by some whoops that are deeper than you thought, and suddenly you're going like this, and passengers are hitting their head against the roof, and maybe stuff in the back's flying around because the truck's just going all cattywompus like that. Now, imagine that scenario with a trailer on the back, where you're not necessarily going too fast, but I mean, within the space of 20 yards, you could encounter, especially if the light is low and you can't quite see the shape of the surface ahead of you, you could get into a situation where, oh my gosh, I'm doing this, and then the natural tendency is get on the brakes, but if, you know, the truck is in the bottom and the trailer's like this, you know, I can imagine a force where instead of the trailer's tongue weight just pushing down normally like it does all the time in a kind of static ho-hum fashion, now all of a sudden the whole mass of the trailer might be attacking the trailer hitch, you know, when the articulation as you're going over these, you know, you get on the brakes and I can see a combination of factors where the force of the trailer isn't just the simple 10% tongue weight pushing down in a steady state fashion, it's going to be like an impulse load into the back at an angle that might tweak something. So, I mean, that's, when I look at that, I kind of put all this, these things I've experienced, I haven't towed one of those trailers myself, but I have, at least not on that kind of surface, I have towed that exact off-the-grid Reynolds trailer with a Tesla Model X on pavement to the Overland Expo, and I did drive on a dirt road, but it was nice and smooth, but I have been on the Mojave Road on a four-day trip with about 12 vehicles, and three of them were towing trailers, not exactly that one, but like that one, same weight and size and configuration, and I followed my buddy who was towing one for a lot of that distance and those things bounce around a lot, you know, they have suspension, but it's not calibrated to, they know nobody's going to be riding back there, so the wheels bounce off the ground and they hop around, and it's pretty easy for me to imagine getting into one of those dips going too fast and just having all these factors kind of come together. What do you make of the argument that it really is the ball that's the problem there? It should have been, they call it a pental hinge, where it's got more, you can move around more on the tongue that doesn't, it's not such the ball-and-hinge setup? Yeah, I mean, I don't know that that would necessarily prevent this from happening. I mean, if we were able to look at the nose of the trailer and see that, oh my gosh, things bent and that was bent too, I can't tell, but I do know that, you know, in that situation where you're towing a trailer through gullies and whoop-de-doos and that kind of thing, you are going to get more articulation than your standard trailer hitch ever sees, you know, when you're just backing down a boat ramp or in your driveway, and so people do use these types of hitches. I don't know that that prevents the trailer from pushing really hard against the vehicle, and it might prevent the hitch from bending, but I don't know if it prevents the load from being transferred into the vehicle like this. Okay, I got one more question for you, and we'll wrap this up, but what do you make of the argument that the frames are just too weak on the Jeep and the ZR2, that if the frame was stronger, it wouldn't have bent? Well, you can always make anything stronger. I think that's hard to know because, again, we're not knowing exactly what's going on here, because if you think about a payload rating and a rear axle GAWR, you're looking at kind of a—here is—I don't know what it is for this truck, but let's just say 1,200 pounds, and the tongue weight is—let's say it's a 2,000-pound trailer, it's got 10% tongue weight, so you got 200 pounds, but it's not right in the middle. It's way back here, four feet back from the tire centerline or three and a half or whatever it is, and we don't know what was in the bed of the truck. I don't know if they told you that, but I'm assuming that if something like this happened to my truck, the first thing I'd do is try to get all the stuff out of the bed and have my buddies carry it for me so I could limp out. So we don't know what the total loading situation was, and then if you're in that situation like I described, where you get into a dip and the trailer isn't just pushing down like this, but the whole weight of the trailer is kind of not pushing straight against the truck but down, and it's an impulse load rather than—like if you hold a hammer to the side of your head, that's a lot different than hitting it. It's the same weight, but it's a matter of the impulse there. So again, this isn't like the steady-state type of load that would be a bunch of firewood in the bed of the truck. I guess I lied about last question. Would you theorize that any truck could have this problem if it was in that situation? I think it's— I don't want to call out different brands, but it seems like it's a situation that could be fairly common to mid-sized trucks off-roading these mid-sized—like I was thinking today, it's like you tell somebody you have a Gladiator. You tell somebody you have a ZR2. I think the assumption is because I have that, now I can do much of off-roading with it, when reality is the frame is the frame throughout the lineup. It's just the suspension and the wheels that are changed, and so just because you have this Gladiator Rubicon doesn't mean it's more badass than a Gladiator Overland version. Right. Yeah, because the type of use they're looking at has more to do with rock crawl, and this type of use where you're just driving through the desert on washboard on whoops is kind of like—that's more of something that a desert racing-focused vehicle like a Raptor would be optimized for. And then you add a trailer in there, and I think a lot of people—I've been involved in a lot of tow tests, and the tow tests are all pulling a trailer on pavement or a flat dirt road. You know, it's about cooling, and do the brakes have enough capacity, and is the rear spring got enough there for the tongue weight, and it's all of that, but you get into this dynamic situation where you're combining off-roading and towing at the same time, and yeah, maybe those situations aren't factored in. Yeah. They shouldn't. Well, it's interesting stuff. It's good stuff to sit around and have a beer and talk about and theorize what happened. Yeah, I mean, theorize is the key word here. I'd really like to be able to poke my head under—you know, I'm known for suspension deep dives where I pull the wheels off and look underneath to see how things are put together, and this is one of those things where I'd love to be the insurance investigator looking at this truck, but I'm not. Well, maybe one of these days you'll find one on the Mojave and you can just say, hey, wait a minute, hold on, let me take a look for you real fast. Yeah, I mean, you know, and I've seen a lot of people tow these trailers, but with Wranglers and FJ80, you know, shorter overhangs, and, you know, pickup truck with a longer overhang because they've got to fit the spare tire back there, and that's just how trucks are arranged. You know, now all of a sudden you've got a slightly different animal, and this adventure towing thing, it's kind of been around for a while at kind of a low simmering boil, but now it seems like it's really popular. I mean, the fact that that trailer was rental shows that, you know, I mean, if there's enough people that are curious about it that a rental company can make money doing that, that's great, but it also shows that, you know, maybe we have somebody who hasn't towed off-road before who's doing it, and that can be, you know, the people who've done it before probably understand the situation and the scenarios I described earlier, but somebody who just rented one, maybe not. And there are also, you know, it's really easy to get going a little bit fast, and you don't think you're going fast, and then all of a sudden the terrain on this trail you've never been on gets really, you know, out of source, and you've got to adjust suddenly, and, you know, you've just got to give yourself margin, and you've got to take your time. Yeah, and you've got to scout a little bit, too. That's the only thing when you're off-roading, it's like in the dunes especially, you have to scout the trail a little bit, you've got to get out of the truck, stop, park, look over the top of the hill, look down, kind of see what's going on. Well, I think there's also a good point there is a lot of people who go out in these groups, you know, you might have two or three people who are doing the trail lead, and you're four or five in the back, but maybe none of them have trailers. So they're approaching the obstacles a certain way, and you, having a trailer, have to approach it completely differently. You've really got to, like, be very aware of what's behind you when you're towing off-road. Yeah, I think that's really good advice. Well, hey, thanks, Dan, for sharing the knowledge. Sure, sure. Okay, that was Dan Edmonds, and so now let's talk about my second engineer who talked about the frame. There's a lot of questions online about this frame. If you look at the Colorado frame and you look at the Gladiator frame, there's two things that stand out. First, they're fully boxed frames. There was a conversation about C-channel versus fully boxed. In this case, they're fully boxed frames, so they're pretty strong frames. Let's dispel that first myth. The second question that came around is, if you look at this one photo, you'll see there's a hole in the frame right where it bent. Initially, the comments online were, well, it's bad engineering. I can't really say the words they wanted to say for that. It's bad engineering. It's dumb hole placement, and why do frames even have holes anyways? I talked to my engineer about this, and he said frames have holes for a variety of reasons. One of the reasons is going to be weld inspection points. They're going to be able to look in the frame and see how well the frame is welded. You're going to see how well it was constructed. They have another thing where they conveyance, where they bring it around the shop. They put it in production, and they do it for E-coating as well, so when they do an E-coating on the frame, a lot of times they'll take it and they'll dip it into the water in the E-coating solution, flip it around, they'll dip it on the other side, and it seals. Other things as far as, it's crash safety standards too. There's crash safety standards involved in it. There's frame rigidity standards that kind of get followed in that as well. The end story on this is very simple. The holes in a frame do not impact the structural integrity of the frame. Let me be very clear. That doesn't impact the structural integrity. I'm going to put this image on the screen one more time, so I'm going to show you something. He said, if you look at this image, look really close underneath the shock, kind of where the shock area is, you'll see what they call a dart. What that is, that's a spot in the frame that's built that way, so that way in a rear-end crash, the frame's going to crumple like that. This is on the ZR2. It's going to crumple in that spot. That way, the rear-end crash, the frame crumbles around the rear axle, so the frame doesn't go upwards. It's designed to go down, and it doesn't go forward. It's designed to crumble if you get a rear-end accident. If you're going over a hill, and you're going to be a big breakover angle, like the guy was doing, and you catch any sort of error, you're putting this entire load against that frame, and it's going to crumble that way. That's what it's designed to do. I thought it was really interesting to know that that's a frame in that spot. It's a very susceptible spot because of the crash testing that they do in that truck. That's not going to change anything there. Now, I was reading some forums, and there were some conversations about whether or not you should weld the frame hole shut. Some guys can do this. You can go and get pieces of metal and frame it shut. The problem with this is, and the danger here, is in two things. Number one, you void the warranty if you do that because you modified the frame. Warranty's done. Number two is that you're always going to have condensation and air and moisture in that frame. You're always going to have that in that frame. When you weld that shut, you actually are getting rid of some of the e-coating, and you're inviting rust to now enter the frame. So if you ever see a truck with welded shut holes on the frame, don't buy it. Walk away because that frame's going to rust faster than a frame that's got the hole in it because the e-coating is wrapped around that, and when you do that welding, you burn off the e-coating, you lock in all the moisture, and you're going to eventually have rust in the frame. All right, let's talk about the shocks. So if you remember the Jeep Gladiator video, the repair shop, the Core Off-Road shop here in Colorado, said that the shocks were too long, which damaged the frame. So I'm going to read to you what my engineer said about this. He said, I can't imagine shocks are to blame, but the Jeep's probably going to void the warranty because they're aftermarket part. Shocks, even if too long, dampen the input force during compression. If the shock does fully limit travel or shock fade occurs due to internal oil temps, then you get into the bump stops, full compression of the suspension. This may have happened, but the frame damage is not the direct reaction to full compression. He's guessing, he goes on to say he's guessing it's too fast, and if the ball hits, there's issues going on. So that's what the engineering answer to the shocks. Okay, on the CR2, if you remember watching that video, the reason the GM was kind of throwing a fit about that truck was because the tires, the tires were bigger. And so he had something to say about that as well. He said that one inch tire increase does increase body frame input substantially. If they are LT tires at 50 psi or greater, then the frame loading is increased even more. And so really increasing more stress in the frame by using that bigger tire. And so when you have a situation where you have this really increased load on the frame, and then you add even more stress in the frame by the way that trailer is hitting that, or if you hit a bump or something, then you're going to get some frame bend. So the last part of this video I want to talk about is what you should do as an owner of this truck. Should you be afraid to go off-roading? No. Should you tow off-road? Yeah, you can tow off-road. There's no problem with that at all. Definitely in this case, he had a rental trailer on both of them, I should say, rental trailers. It looks like that ball and hitch setup. You really want like a pental looking attachment. I'll put a picture of this in the screen. And that allows the frame, that allows the trailer to move more and articulate more when you're going over some hills and things. Something to keep in mind. Also keep the speed down. It's interesting, like you heard in Dan Edmond's piece, about how much faster you tend to go off-road than you think about. And so if you're towing off-road, you really want to go slow. And you really want to get out and inspect the area and make sure you know what you're driving over. Because the last thing you want to do is have too much speed and hit those whoops or hit those spots and really damage that truck and frame. Because they're going to find every reason possible to void your warranty and deny your claim. Whether or not they're going to see the tires are heavier other than I can say the shocks are heavier. So really keep that in mind when you're off-roading. And well, just be careful out there. That's the end of the story. Be a smart driver. Don't be foolish. Don't be jumping stuff. Be a smart off-road driver. So hey, for more Pickup Truck Plus SUV news, make sure you find us on PickupTruckTalk.com. Those three words work again on Pickup Truck Talk on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Trust me, type it in. We're there. As always, thanks for watching. I'll see you down the road.