1994 Dodge Ram, the Ram Pickup’s Last Big Makeover

From the August 1993 issue of Car and Driver.

Bart McLellan, the product­ planning chief of Dodge Truck, wishes the launch of a new full­-size pickup could be like that line in the movie Field of Dreams. The one that goes: “If you build it, they will come.” But this is real life, and McLel­lan understands that Dodge will have to overcome fierce brand loyalty in the light-truck business if it is to meet its optimistic sales target of 160,000 trucks. Small as that number may seem when compared with the sales of mar­ket titans Ford and Chevrolet, it is twice Dodge’s current market share.

The doubling of current sales may seem a tall order, but McLellan and the other members of the T300 light-truck engineering team have high hopes. Their strategy to break the GM and Ford stranglehold on the pickup mar­ket began with targeting all the areas of truck ownership and operation that would make the new Ram a class leader. Then they systematically set out to meet those objectives.

They defined their targets by recruiting 100 employees as a jury and having them evaluate a number of current vehicles (including some high-­end luxury cars) to establish 400 detail objectives for the new truck. The jury was then called back to monitor progress at various intervals during the development process.

The broad aim of the Dodge team included better ride and handling, comfort, convenience, and safety, plus increased storage, hauling, and towing capacities. They also wanted to improve passenger space and to provide switch and control tactile qualities like those of a good pas­senger car. Equally important, the T300 needed an appearance that would be instantly recognizable.

Because of that prerequisite, an initial styling presentation was rejected by Chrysler president Bob Lutz, who asked the artists to be more radical in their approach. So chief designer Trevor Creed went looking for inspiration in trucks of the past and found the Power Wagon, a 1950s Dodge pickup with a distinctive front end. Creed echoed the high vertical grille and dropped fender-line motif in his T300 concept truck, the LRT, and then put it on show to test public reaction.

Lutz was emphatic about the love-it-or-leave-it aspect of contentious styling. He reasoned it would provide a strong incen­tive for sales, even if the love-hate ratio was 20/80. Clinics have since elicited responses more like 50/50, so this may turn out to have been a smart gamble. Our only real regret is that a front-end treatment with a chrome grille-surround has been selected for most of the models. We pre­fer the matte-argent surround with black grillework that we saw on one of the trucks. Fortunately, our preference will be available on some models, and spokesmen say that body-color grilles are also on the way.

Before tackling the interior, chief designer Trevor Creed looked at pho­tographs of pickup-truck cabs to see how owners customized them. As a result, he has incorporated the trucking world’s first “center high-mounted cupholders,” which pop out of the dash above the radio. The rest of the interior layout combines carlike aesthetics and truck functionality with the elegant simplicity we’ve come to expect of Creed’s work these days. The premise is that even tough truckers like stylish sur­roundings, an idea Creed says was con­firmed by research.

In response to another perceived customer requirement, Creed’s team endowed the new truck range with an unusually large cab. In addition to enough room for C/D‘s tallest truck driver, there is space behind the seats for what Dodge calls cab­-back storage. The rear bulkhead incorpo­rates special hooks that will mount cus­tom-made nets, pockets, and racks. The extra space has also enabled Dodge to relax the seatback angle on the regular bench seat by a few degrees (to 21 degrees of rake), but the real hot wrinkle in the new truck is a novel 40/20/40-split front seat that allows individual adjustments and uti­lizes the middle seatback as a fold-down storage box.

Even in the bed, where you hardly expect innovations, there are a couple of handy features. In addition to the usual stake pockets (those holes in the top rim of the box), there are low-level tie-downs and clever tamped-in bulkhead dividers for wooden crossmembers, so that loads can be compartmentalized vertically and horizontally.

Starting this fall, Dodge will offer reg­ular-cab versions of all three payload ranges (half-ton, three-quarter-ton, and one-ton payloads), designated as 1500, 2500, and 3500 models in long- and short-­bed form , with either rear- or four-wheel drive. The available engines will be a base 3.9-liter V-6, a 5.2-liter V-8, a 5.9-liter V-8 in light- and heavy-duty spec, and a 5.9-liter six-cylinder Cummins turbo-­diesel. The “iron-Viper” 8.0-liter V-10 will be available by January 1994. Cab­-chassis versions will roll off the line in November of this year, and club-cab production is expected to start by June 1994. Dodge will leave the four-door crew-cab market to Ford and Chevy.

To cover the enormous spread of appli­cations, there are five transmissions in the catalog. All of the trucks will come with a five-speed manual as standard equipment, with four-speed automatics available as options. The manuals are supplied by New Venture Gear and come in light-duty, heavy-duty, and extra-heavy-duty (for the Cummins diesel engine and the V-10, both of which produce 400-plus pound-feet of torque). The automatics are Kokomo devices in light- and heavy-duty configurations. Four-wheel drive is handled, as usual, by transfer cases, which are synchronized for shifting-on-the-fly. The heavy-duty trans­fer cases include power-take-off provi­sions, even (for the first time) on auto­matic-transmission 4wd models.

We drove a range of prototype trucks, with manual and automatic transmissions, and found the powertrains highly satisfac­tory. The manual-transmission trucks have a shifter that feels light and fluid, with smooth engagement, and the autoboxes (being electronically controlled) were any­thing but agricultural in the way they swapped ratios. The V-6 was absent from the lineup, but we tried the 5.9-liter V-8 with both types of gearbox and were pleased with the power delivery, the low noise levels, and the effective isolation.

Even in a 4wd Ram, the ride has been finessed beyond what you might think possible in a truck designed for hard work. The rigid rear axle was given eight-inch -longer leaf springs for a compliant ride. The front end uses a rigid axle with double-leading links and a Panhard rod, a setup much like that found on the smooth­-riding Jeep Grand Cherokee. Rear-drive trucks get a double-control-arm front end, and the ride here is even better. But softer does not mean weaker, says executive engineer Craig Winn. “The trucks have accumulated four million miles of testing. We’ve run the durability course at such high speed that we bent frames.”

Some of the brutal testing was neces­sary because this will be the first truck to come equipped with an airbag. Due to the severe operating conditions trucks find themselves in, the airbag sensor calibra­tion had to be absolutely foolproof. Says Craig Winn: “We wanted to be sure there would be no inadvertent deployments, so we rammed curbs, dropped wheels into potholes, and ran snowplows into sand­banks. As well as two airbag bumper sen­sors, we have a ‘safing’ sensor on the tun­nel to ensure the bag only goes off in a real accident.”

Although fine-tuning was still in progress when we drove the T300s, our demo trucks had clearly lost the numb, squashy, and vague control feel that might have been acceptable in yesterday’s trucks. When we tried the turbo-diesel, we found not only a responsive and torquey power­train (with substantially reduced diesel clatter), but accurate and damped steering feel as well. The brake pedal (on all models) was just a tiny bit of squish short of decent feel. We also drove the V-10 truck and discovered a delightfully smooth, massively strong powertrain. And, as in all the others, the driver’s environment felt safely isolated from noise or vibration.

From a real working truck driver’s per­spective, the important thing about the new Ram series is that it offers the highest GCW (gross combined weight, the sum of payload and towing capacities) of any full­-size truck on the market. The trucks also meet new 1994 safety standards, which demand center high-mounted stoplights, compliance with roof-crush standards, and side-intrusion protection. And with what we’ve experienced in driving them, the new Rams look set to deliver on the promise of space and comfort as well as in the arena of ride and handling.

Obviously, our limited access to the trucks only tells part of the story. With the mind-boggling multiplicity of chassis, engines, transmissions, axles, wheelbases, and bed and cab sizes that make up a full­-size pickup-truck range, the new Ram’s potential has yet to be measured in real­-world terms. However, Chrysler’s recent performance and our limited experience with the new Dodge trucks suggest that the new Ram is close to where the company wants it to be. And that’s on the Field of Dreams Come True. Where, if you build it right, they do come. And then they leave—in one of your trucks.