Long-Term Road Test
From the July 2010 Issue of Car and DriverTESTED
“It’s so nice to have a man around the house.”
Gender roles and attitudes have undergone considerable revision since Dinah Shore warbled those words in a recording studio back in 1950, but in the automotive world that old premise still has legs. Our long-term 2009 Dodge Ram 1500 pickup is an excellent case in point. This truck is nothing if not manly, with its macho styling and brawny Hemi V-8 power, augmented by a masculine rumble when the driver summons all the horses (390 of them, plus 407 pound-feet of torque).
The Hemi’s potent throb provided an agreeable accompaniment to the various missions we found for this big boy during its 11-month tour at C/D. There were many of these, ranging from around-town furniture schleppage to cross-continent hauling, usually with a flatbed trailer and someone’s race car in tow. Although fuel economy suffered with anything attached to the hitch—12 mpg or less was the norm—the Ram otherwise excelled at towing, inspiring numerous logbook entries of the “hell-of-a-truck” variety.
That was the bottom line on this long-term test. But the joy of stewardship wasn’t totally unalloyed; there were detractors.
Before we get to the nit-picking, a little hardware review. Following the Ram’s first-place finish in our most recent Big Three pickup comparo, we requested a similar truck for long-term evaluation. It’s one thing to prevail in a three-day ramble through Texas (where the then-new Ram drew appreciative stares and queries, no mean feat in a land where pickups outnumber women). It’s quite another to endure the hard use and occasional abuse that goes with 40,000 miles in the C/D test fleet.
Pricing for 2009 half-ton (1500 series) Rams started at $22,420. That got you a basic standard-cab model with rear-wheel drive and a 3.7-liter V-6 engine. The base price for our test truck—crew cab, four-wheel drive, mid-level SLT trim—was $36,000.
To that we added power-adjustable, leather-trimmed bucket front seats ($1875); a Sport package (115-volt power outlet, leather-wrapped steering wheel with auxiliary audio controls, heated power side mirrors with turn-signal repeaters, fog lamps, an electric shift-on-the-fly four-wheel-drive selector, and various trim elements, for $3840); remote start ($335); a Sport Premium package (rear park assist, dual-zone climate control, and Alpine audio upgrade, for $750); a nav system with Sirius satellite audio ($1745); power-adjustable pedals ($125); a 32-gallon fuel tank ($75); a Class IV trailer-hitch receiver and seven-pin connector ($335); the exterior RamBox bins for small-cargo storage ($1895); and, of course, the 5.7-liter Hemi V-8 ($1310).
Including the $900 destination charge, it added up to a $48,285 truck. Dodge has whittled almost a grand off Ram pricing for 2010, and our example was still some distance from the top of the price charts. But no one could call it inexpensive.
Nor was it inexpensive to feed. EPA-rated at 13 mpg in the city and 18 on the highway, our Ram’s fuel economy over 40,000 miles averaged 14 mpg. We didn’t have to burn premium—Dodge recommends mid-grade for this version of the Hemi, but 2857 gallons of any fuel tends to add up to a hefty sum: $7631, for mid-grade in our case. You may have noticed this phenomenon yourself.
Generally speaking, the Ram went about its duties without any big problems. All but one of its service visits was routine, consisting primarily of oil changes, tire rotations, and a variety of inspections. But there were quite a few of these maintenance stops—six in 36,000 miles—and not all of them were cheap. The one that stands out in this regard is the 30,000-mile service, which ran $483, and that included new spark plugs (16 of them). The plugs cost $84. But getting the old ones out and the new ones in took 2.9 hours at $96 per, adding $278 in labor to the tab.
All told, the service charges came to $961. Astonishingly, there were also five recalls baked into our visits—reprogramming the ABS and parking-assist computers, applying “anti-squeak tape” to the hood, fortifying the tailgate spoiler with two-sided tape, and replacing the lock cylinders on the RamBox bins—but costs associated with these were covered under warranty. And we had one unscheduled dealer visit, in response to a persistent check-engine light. This turned out to be a wiring problem, which, like updates required in the recalls, cost us nothing.
