probably the same thing that happened in 78 when they dropped the big block and the biggest you can get was a 360 in a truck ...yet ferd kept the 460 going and chivvy had big blocks ........had the diesel not come along, the trucks were out gunned bad without a big block option.
I have an early 90s ferd tow rig with a 460 and I think ...dang why couldn't Chrysler have made a fuel injected 440 in the late 80s early 90s Ram 3/4 ton
Gotta think like they thought back in the late '70's, early '80's with the financial issues Chrysler was having and look into what Iaccoca was doing with the company.
Poor sales and increasing CAFE standards put the writing on the wall years earlier. The B-body was the only platform that was big block capable with the C-body being killed off just a few years before and coming out of the gas crunch people just weren't buying big blocks. Chrysler just didn't have the money to keep the big block, unchanged, just for the trucks, where Ford and GM did.
But Chrysler was dropping the ball all over the place at about that time.
Killing the E-body in '74 was a big one. All the big three's sales were suffering in the pony car market and then a certain movie featuring a black Firebird hit the big screen and pony car sales for GM and Ford rose again.
The death of the A-body, a tried and true platform, to be replaced with the F-body, a platform of dubious quality - especially in the first few years of production. Chrysler was making bad decisions all the way around.
Then Iaccoca really wasn't sold on the idea of pick-ups to begin with. Development money was being put into front drivers, all of them some kind of variation off of the K-car. (The driving factor behind keeping the M-body around was fleet sales.) One of the reasons the truck really hadn't been updated since '72.
Sales were just enough to keep the pick-up in production, but not enough to look into the avenue of truly revolutionizing the industry.
