Instrumented Test
TESTED
When the fracking wildcatters hit the big one on the Car and Driver ranch, we can imagine ambling over to the wellhead in a Cummins-fired Ram 3500 Mega Cab 4x4 dualie. And we’re not alone. U.S. automakers make billions of dollars each year selling full-size pickup trucks by the, er, truckload. It’s a fairly unique American phenomenon, having so much heavy-duty rolling stock in so many personal hands that you’d be forgiven for thinking of it as a sacrosanct amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But what’s even more special is the way some brands have complemented that capability by slathering heaping dollops of luxury onto and into their HD rigs.
Take, for instance, our Laramie Longhorn–trimmed Ram test truck. German high-end luxury sedans take notice: The western-themed Longhorn has almost as much leather upholstery and trim as do the livestock the truck is trailering. It displays more six-shooter-style filigree on the dash and doors than Ted Cruz would at an NRA open-carry picnic. There are enough seat warmers to keep five large denim-shod butts toasty. Real barbed-wire-scarred fencepost wood trim? The Longhorn’s got it, and short of actual Longhorn horns splayed across the grille (not a Ram option—as of now), it’s inexplicably appropriate here. Yet the big Ram is also tech-savvy, having Chrysler’s latest Uconnect 8.4-inch touch-screen navigation, as well as voice-command, Bluetooth, and mobile Wi-Fi hotspot capabilities.
Dualie My Mega
The Mega Cab is just that—mega by means of an expansive four-door crew cab that’s been stretched a few inches to add a one-by-six-foot storage area behind the now-reclinable rear seats. The downside is the Mega Cab can’t be configured with the eight-foot cargo bed, only the “short” six-foot, four-inch one. But spanning nearly 21 feet nose to hitch, the Mega Cab is probably already long enough. Wide enough, too, as dualie versions like our test truck fill a traffic lane with few inches to spare.
Our test truck was equipped with the $7795 Cummins inline-six turbo-diesel. Ram offers three versions of this engine: a 350-hp unit with 660 lb-ft of torque and a class-exclusive six-speed manual transmission; a 370-hp iteration with 800 lb-ft of grunt and the Chrysler-built six-speed automatic; and the one in our truck, a bragging-rights 385-hp version producing 850 lb-ft and hooked to a heavy-duty Aisin-built wide-ratio six-speed auto. All the Cummins mills now employ urea injection to reduce NOx emissions and feature a diesel-exhaust-fluid (DEF) gauge across from the regular fuel gauge to keep tabs on the precious liquid. The truck will give numerous reminders before reaching empty, but run out of DEF, and the Ram won’t run.
Sure, the Ford and GM HD pickups have their big diesels, too, but there’s something so right about the purr of the six oil pots in the medium-duty semi-truck Cummins. The torque claim of 850 lb-ft currently puts the Cummins-powered Ram on top in the full-size-truck wars. The big 6.7-liter six spools up quickly with little turbo lag and gets to the fat part of the torque curve in a hurry. The Mega Cab dualie’s 8.9-second 0-to-60 sprint might not sound like fast company, but believe us when we say that when the Cummins is on full boil, you feel something substantial has been set in motion.
