2018 Ram 2500 Lone Star Mega Cab 4x4 on 2040-cars

Auto blog

Here's how I averaged 31.5 mpg in a Ram HFE EcoDiesel

Few things could be more American than a bright red Ram pickup parked in front of Mount Rushmore. To get there and back on a single tank of fuel from the nearest major city, however, requires a collaboration of international proportions. This particular Ram is a 1500 HFE EcoDiesel, festooned with badges indicating the presence of an Italian turbodiesel V6 mated to a German eight-speed automatic. Some Rams are even built in Mexico, but this one only boasted a 27 percent Mexican parts content. A rather global truck, this one. It is the sum of its parts, but those bits and pieces were curated by a team of engineers in Michigan. At the risk of hipstering its history, the Ram HFE (High Fuel Efficiency) package was truly custom-tailored for one purpose: Achieving an EPA-rated 29 mpg on the highway, which is 1 mpg better than a standard Ram 1500 EcoDiesel. It did just that. No, it did better than that, but more on that in a minute. The Ram has stuck with its "son of big rig" styling for nearly 25 years; opting for the EcoDiesel V6 means you can fill up next to Peterbilts. My goal was to bypass truck stops entirely. I left Denver early in the morning and aimed to enjoy lunch with Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, and Lincoln looking over my shoulder before heading home for dinner. Mt. Rushmore is about 370 miles away from the northernmost truck stop within Denver, where I filled the Ram HFE's tank and headed northbound on Interstate 25 toward Wyoming and a series of smaller highways that roughly follow an old stagecoach route from Cheyenne to what is now Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota. The Ram was such a fuel miser that I could have driven an extra 50 miles each way and still avoided the pumps. It's beautifully stark country: the kind of desolate place where the FM radio does a lot of seeking; that's all the audio I had on board because the Ram HFE is decidedly lacking in comfort and convenience features. To get to an EPA-estimated 29 mpg highway figure, Ram engineers had to goals: To strip weight and improve aerodynamics. In the wind tunnel, the medium-size 4x2 Quad Cab with 20-inch wheels and the Ram Express trim level's one-piece front bumper proved the most aerodynamic configuration of the many flavors of Ram available. Interestingly, testing revealed that adding full-length tubular side steps and a tri-fold tonneau cover normally offered in the Mopar accessories catalog aid aerodynamics.

2021 Ram 1500 pickup earns IIHS Top Safety Pick award with updated safety equipment

Thanks to changes in option-package content, the 2021 Ram 1500 crew cab pickup achieves a Top Safety Pick rating from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS). For 2021, the Ram adds Pedestrian Protection as part of the optional Advanced Safety Group, which allows the forward collision prevention system to detect people walking in front of the vehicle. Pedestrian collision mitigation is one of the requirements for earning an IIHS Top Safety Pick rating. In IIHS testing, the Ram's pedestrian-protection system avoided hitting the pedestrian dummy or braked enough to moderate the impact in all tests save for one where the vehicle is traveling 37 mph and the pedestrian is walking in the same direction. Still, the overall results of the vehicle-to-pedestrian tests and the vehicle-to-vehicle collision avoidance tests, where the Ram avoided crashes at 12 and 25 mph, were deemed "Acceptable" and "Superior" respectively. The Ram also achieved a top score of "Good" in the agency's various crash tests. The final hurdle to achieving an IIHS award is headlight performance. For the Top Safety Pick+ level, all available headlights must score Acceptable or Good, and for the one-rung-down Top Safety Pick, at least one available headlight option must score Acceptable or Good. The Ram 1500's SmartBeam curve-adaptive LED headlamps were the only ones to make the grade, which landed the Ram at the Top Safety Pick level. The award applies only to the 2021 Ram 1500 Laramie, Laramie Longhorn, and Limited optioned with the Advanced Safety Group and SmartBeam headlamps. Based on IIHS testing so far, the Ram is the first full-size pickup to achieve a Top Safety Pick award for this year. Related Video:

Chrysler banks $507 million in Q2, trims 2013 earnings forecast

Chrysler has some good news and some bad news. First, profits were up 16 percent over the second quarter of 2012, bringing the Auburn Hills, Michigan-based manufacturer $507 million on the back of strong demand for trucks and SUVs (a recurring theme this quarter, particularly in the US). Q2 revenue was up as well, from $16.8 billion in 2012 to $18 billion in 2013. The bad news is that the Pentastar's overall earnings forecast for net income in 2013 has been trimmed from $2.2 billion to between $1.7 and $2.2 billion, according to Automotive News.
In addition to the adjusted net income forecast, Chrysler tweaked its operating profit from $3.8 billion to between $3.3 and $3.8 billion. This has gone largely unexplained by Chrysler, perhaps hoping the news of a three-percent increase in its transaction prices for Q2 will allow it to sweep this adjustment under the rug.
The star of the show for Chrysler has been its US sales, which saw a 10-percent jump, both bettering the industry average of eight percent and improving over the same stretch of 2012. As with the increase in transaction prices, Chrysler has the new Ram pickup and Jeep Grand Cherokee to thank. Perhaps most worrying from this report, though, is that every brand in the automaker's stable saw an increase in sales... except for the Chrysler brand itself.