The big and the beautiful
Ram is only in NZ thanks to a right-hand-drive conversion programme by American Special Vehicles (ASV), which is an Australian joint venture between Walkinshaw Automotive Group (yes, the HSV people) and Ateco Automotive, which is also the Kiwi importer for FCA. It’s complicated.
ASV has a direct line of communication to FCA head office and the conversion work has been undertaken using design data from Ram Trucks. They’ve done a beautiful job: Ram pickups are somewhat retro in their cabin design anyway, so you have to come prepared for that. But the fit and finish of the right-hook examples is outstanding and the engineering is exemplary, the result of a full body-off conversion and a substantial amount of component remanufacturing.
There are still some niggles: the foot-operated parking brake is mounted awkwardly high on the right-hand side of the footwell and (curiously) the UConnect information and entertainment touch-screen still has the climatecontrol master temperature setting on the left-hand side. It wouldn’t matter so much if it wasn’t a really long reach.
Still, it’s an impressive job, which goes some way towards explaining the price. The Ram 2500 Laramie costs $163,000, which seems like silly money. In the US, this model costs roughly the same as the current Jeep Grand Cherokee Limited 75th anniversary model, which is a $91,990 proposition here. It pays not to try and rationalise it because you won’t. People who really want one of these won’t be focused on the price.
What’s the point? Well, there is one, actually. The Ram pickup is all about towing. The 2500 model can carry 913kg in the tray or haul 6989kg using a heavy duty ‘pintle’ towbar.
I’ll give you a moment to take that in.
There’s also a 3500 model, with leaf springs at the back instead of coils. It carries more in the tray (1713kg) but less on the towball (6170kg).
It’s better to think of the Ram as a baby truck rather than a large pickup. Kerb weight is 3577kg (so yes, you can technically drive it one-up in a transit lane) and it has exhaust brakes. Yes, proper exhaust brakes: with a push of the button you can set them to Automatic or Full. They’re really meant for towing, but they’re also great fun on the school run.
More to the point, if you use even half of the Ram’s towing capacity, you’re going to need a Class 2 licence. To repeat: baby truck.
So the Ram has practical purpose for the select few who need to tow Really Big Stuff. For the rest of us, it’s a chance to bring out the inner child and incite instant dejection of the faces of those who drive dressed-up Ford Rangers.
Ram is just over six metres long, near enough to two metres high and over two metres wide. Head-on, it’s an enormous square.
The 6.7-litre Cummins turbodiesel six-cylinder engine makes 276kW and a staggering 1084Nm of torque. Never has a vehicle so unwieldy to drive managed to be so awesome anyway.
You could almost fit the tiny, $25,990 Fiat 500 1.4 Sport in the tray. Overlook the intrusion of the Ram’s rear wheelarches for the sake of the joke, and the Fiat’s 1627mm width would indeed slide inside the 1687mm tray. There would be a bit hanging out the back: the Ram’s cargo deck is ‘‘just’’ 1939mm and the Fiat has a total length of 3546mm. But overlook a few kilogrammes and the Ram could theoretically also take the weight of the sub-1000kg Fiat.
The Ram has four times the power and eight times the torque of the 500 Sport, although hilariously they have nearidentical power-to-weight ratios: give or take a few tenths, 77kW per tonne. Finally, baby matches boofhead.
We do love the 500, even if this one is really only here for scale. Shame it’s not more popular in NZ: this model has actually been replaced by a new one in Europe, but such is the modesty of interest among Kiwis in this baby, Ateco isn’t even sure we’ll see the latest version.
As it stands, the 500 is flawed but fun: you have to drive it flatout and the so-called Dualogic single-clutch robotised gearbox must be mastered. Once you have, it’s highly engaging, but not entirely smooth. Which shouldn’t matter if you’re driving it flat-out like you’re supposed to.
By the way, the 500 is the only Fiat-badged model sold in America. Which really does make it a sister model to the Ram.
There might come a day when FCA really focuses its attention of producing global models that aren’t so heavily influenced by regional preferences.
After jumping in between these two for a week, I’d be really sad about that.