It's weird to see a new vehicle announced like this that's not an EV. I wonder what it's like launching a gas truck when new battery-powered trucks are looming in the distance (or already here).
It's weird to see a new vehicle announced like this that's not an EV. I wonder what it's like launching a gas truck when new battery-powered trucks are looming in the distance (or already here).
There are many great EV cars. But when you have a trailer or caravan we still talk about a heavily reduced range (and often they aren't allowed to pull at all, or weight limits get a problem, at least in Europe)
The interesting thing in the US is that a lot of pickups, possibly most of them, are purchased for regular daily driving. None of the people I know with pickups have trailers.
American trucks are built for towing -- it's one of the reasons they are so big and heavy and expensive -- so I get where the "trucks are for towing" wisdom comes from.
But it's still funny to me. Because in my mind one of the main perks of an open bed is that you can do so much before having to deal with a trailer (which are super annoying, especially in cities, especially without off-street parking).
Which I guess is just to say: maybe there's a market for a truck that can't tow much, because maybe there's a portion of the market that wants an open bed but doesn't need to tow a massive camper or whatever.
I love seeing Ram 6000 Max Diesel Rampage Pros who’s sole job is going to work and Walmart.
And when they pick up groceries they load everything onto the floor of the back seat because the bed is so high up you’d need a step ladder to use it
I think the more important reasons are to prevent the groceries from sliding around in the bed and to protect them from the sun and precipitation.
Dang, if only someone made an everyday car with a soft weather proof enclosed cargo area, possibly you could have the tailgate open up and away as well so it's not in the way. I would think Americans would love to have something more practical than a work vehicle
Sure, I could buy a dedicated more efficient car for the rare days when there is zero risk of rain and I don't need to haul anything larger.
After more than 1cm of rain, the last 500m of the steep dirt road up to my off-grid house in the mountains is completely impassable without 4wd. And I, or my family-in-law, regularly haul large trees, construction equipment, several 100kg of fertilizer, etc. in the truck bed.
Buying a single vehicle, a pre-owned 4wd Ford Ranger made the most economic sense.
Not doubting there's a place for them. I'm in suburbia and all my friends have or want them for grocery getting. It's stupid.
Suburban Americans are temporarily embarrassed farmers and outdoorsmen.
Sounds communist
Still see this in the ones with tonneau covers as if they intended to put cargo in the bed
But who knows maybe it’s already full of stuff under there
> But who knows maybe it’s already full of stuff under there
This is why I'm excited for REO.
I live in a pretty dense city and don't have much storage space in my residence. On the weekends I'm clearing and developing a lot a couple of hours away. My vehicle doubles as storage for all the stuff I need for that and don't want to leave unattended (saws, tools, winch, etc).
I used a Forester for the first two years, which was cramped but doable. The bigger issue was messes. Oil has a way of getting everywhere. I also had one gas spill from a faulty saw gas cap which was both dangerous and a huge PITA to clean up. I also got to a phase where the difference between awd and 4x4 matters, and where I was yanking milled planks around which didn't feel safe doing with the forester.
I switched to a truck after a couple of years and went small. The box is completely full between tools, saws, gas, winch, ropes, etc. When I do groceries I can usually fit some of the "hard" bags back there (cans, bottles) but the rest has to go up front.
A REO would be great for my use-case. The price is low enough that for the price of a new Tacoma or F-150 I could (get close enough to) buying both a REO and a used beater 3/4 ton at the property, which is a better fit for the things I need a big truck for anyways. And I wouldn't be driving a dumb big truck around a very cramped city.
For now I'm stuck with a big truck in the city because owning more than one personal vehicle in this town is insanity.
Get a work van. It's a big capped pickup bed basically. But a reasonable size
I did consider.
Maybe in the past, but the size thing isn't really true of the modern line-up. Relative to eg a base Tacoma or especially a Maverick, The Ford Transit has about the same wheel base, is slightly heavier, has worse visibility (for me at least), has a larger displacement engine, and is on a pragmatic level more difficult to maneuver and park. They also have far fewer creature comforts, which wouldn't be a huge deal if they didn't MSRP at $10K MORE than a base midsized truck!
Vans also don't have 4x4, have much lower ground clearance, no good mechanism for transporting longer stuff, and you can't hose them out nearly as easily as a truck bed. The main thing that those vans are built for is just lots of weight in the van. Great fits for some use-cases, but not mine.
And, again, they're just seriously expensive for what they are because of all the commercial applications.
I did also consider an old minivan or a used van from previous generations when they made the smaller transits. Again, 4x4/awd isn't really super optional in these parts, so pickins were slim.
Roof rack for long stuff. Maverick seems too small to even be useful for that.
I once met a homeless guy who kept a mattress back there.
The Ram 6000 Max Diesel Rampage Pro: Because homelessness can be anyone's future
A friend with a RAM 1500 truck (a brute of a machine) bought a Harley in a neighboring state, I kept him company during the 8h ordeal. He rented a trailer because the bike was too heavy to hoist on the bed. Hillarious.
It's just a style thing, folks, however silly. Why do Texans wear cowboy hats and boots?
> hoist
FWIW, transporting (even large) bikes in the bed of a truck is doable and normal. The typical way to do this isn't with a hoist. You just ride or walk it up a ramp and tie it down.
ofc a Forester or RAV4 with a trailer is a far superior solution, especially for interstate driving where the trailer is less of an annoyance.
What’s the “all hat no cattle” for pickups?
All truck no load?
Another reason is to avoid letting the inside of the bed get scratched. I lived in Texas for a while, and people were that fussy about their trucks.
As a european I would have thought having scratches in the bed and dirt on the bodywork would be a mark of pride.
Nope, sign of (relative) poverty. Big trucks are expensive, and having one that has obviously never seen so much as a 2x4 is very effective class signaling. The people who actually need trucks to work with buy the cheapest option that gets the job done and wring every last dollar back out of it.
First thing I did with my truck is get a spray-in bed liner.
So true! My Ram 1500 was purchased to pull our travel trailer. It has the tow package and is factory raised up some. I'm kind of old, so I keep a three-step ladder in the bed so I can easily climb into it.
Because of the poor gas mileage, I always wonder at why people drive these gas guzzlers as their main transport. But each to his own. (BTW, some claim safety, but it's probably fashion.)
The safety aspect is intersting. The driver might be safer, but they are vastly more likely to kill anything they hit.
https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/news/2025/being-hit-suv-i...
Which a selfish person is definitely okay with, might even like it.
To be fair it would slide all over in the bed.
But they have a clean, covered bed and sparking clean trailer hitch that's never seen a trailer tongue - just in case.
Drug store cowboys, aka "big hat; no cattle"
Isn’t the Ram Rampage a more compact non US market 4cyl variant? Like a maverick competitor?
I just made up a name. I know Rebel is a model that’s hilariously large. Don’t know about others.
Yes, the RAM Rampage is comparable to a Ford Maverick which is a unibody vehicle with a truck bed.
The massive truck they likely meant would be a RAM 3500 HD super crew cab full size bed Cummins diesel dually rear axle with a vertical dual stainless steel smokestack exhaust kit for good measure. Which is essentially the largest truck you can get with a pickup bed from RAM, GM, or Ford; and they go for over $100,000 with options.
There are even larger monstrosities with pickup beds built on top of 550/5500/Class 5 truck chassis which are basically a Canyonero from He Simpsons in real life: https://www.elevationoffgrid.com/
My favorite derogatory term for a vehicle type is ‘hausfrauenpanzer’ which means ‘housewife tank’ in German, which is used for a large SUV in Germany, lol.
It's honestly not that many. That's a very expensive truck for a daily driver. Most likely they have a large Airstream camper, horse trailer, or 5th wheel trailer or similar that they pull with it.
Sure, some people just like a big diesel truck for ego reasons. But the cost of them limits most people's ability to endulge that.
I grew up in a suburb of Detroit, and when I went back to visit the family home a few years ago, every street was parked up on both sides with giant vehicles. It was a sight to behold.
They weren't all the most expensive trucks, and many were noticeably older. Things in our town went up and down with the cycle of the car industry.
That’s what one would expect, but in some parts of the US it’s not uncommon to see dilapidated houses with a shiny tricked out F-150 that’s never worked a day in its life sitting out in the parking lot…
I think for some it’s an identity thing more than anything else.
> But the cost of them limits most people's ability to endulge that.
Sounds like you’ve never been to the US. Thanks to cheap credit, every hillbilly and redneck has one of these. Which feels like about 60% of the population sometimes.
I have lived in the US my entire life. And yes pickup trucks are part of the "country" or "rural" identity to some extent but most people who live in rural areas actually use their trucks as trucks frequently. They pull trailers, or use them to haul furniture, appliances, building materials, trash... all the stuff that has delivery services in the city but you have to do for yourself if you live in the country.
Earlier, you wrote:
> It's honestly not that many.
I can't identify with this. You see these trucks everywhere. There are far more of them than there's any reason for - other than the whole weird only-in-America "light truck" regulations that relax emissions requirements for these trucks. Basically, a big reason we see so many of them is that the US simply refuses to take global warming seriously, instead basically saying "we're going to stick it to the planet as hard as we can, damn the consequences."
And when I said hillbillies and rednecks, I'm not talking about the actual people using their trucks for what they're supposed to be used for. I'm talking about the pavement princesses which wouldn't actually haul anything in their trucks because it would scratch the beds. They have the hillbilly redneck mindset without doing the work that justifies it. The truck is an emotional support vehicle for them, or a gender affirming vehicle. And there's no world in which you can honestly say "there aren't that many" of those in the US.
Speeding through school zones in a maximum impact people killer sure is fun too though
The suburban people buying Ram 9001 Warlord Editions are not the target market for this truck.
4 trips a year picking up a heavy excavator or tractor so you dont have to pay a tradesman a gazillion dollars and it pays for itself. "But just pay someone to haul it or rent a truck" lmao good fucking luck down my dirt roads
“Compensation” and extreme loneliness (cannot find my tribe without spreading its dumb peacock wings so they know I fit in)
What do you mean daily driving? Like commutes? That wouldn't make any sense.
Yes exactly this. The parking lot of a typical American urban workplace will be filled with a disproportionate number of pickup trucks.
Our culture ties our cars to our identities.
That some people buy them and don't really need them has zero relevance on whether any people have need for them.
How people use the vehicles that they buy is pretty well understood from the market research done by the car industry. In the US, the widespread use of pickup trucks a passenger vehicles is a known fact.
An odd thing is that my family visited a rural part of England last year, and we saw very few pickup trucks on the roads and in the towns. On a walking tour, you see a lot of farms up close because the paths go through farms and along fence lines. The farms had utility vehicles including light trucks, but they also had regular passenger cars.
There was a phase where these ghastly large pickups with four doors were common. Never had a drop of mud on them, but they were available tax free as a “work vehicle”, so no income tax on it.
They are ridiculous in the lanes round here, and invariably are in the disabled parking spaces at the shop as they are too large to fit in normal spaces
There isn’t much need in the UK. Farmers use tractors or vehicles like the classic 4x4 Land Rover, Subarus, etc. None of the roads or the infrastructure are designed for American size pickups, especially not the countryside. If people need to move something big, they hire a van.
People are also extremely sensitive to fuel costs and an enormous car that guzzles gas and can’t be parked on a tiny village road is a downside. Bear in mind gas in Europe is like $8/gal and salaries are much lower.
The statement car of choice for people who don’t need the functionality is the modern luxury Land/Range rover (ie the Chelsea tractor).
And a lot of people have occasional need for a truck but don't want to or can't afford to own more than one car, so they use the truck for all their driving.
Exactly. People are optimizing for the most capability on one car payment. And for a lot of them that looks like a pickup but it also drives what people buy in the SUV market as well. This has bee known for decades. Like it's literally defining principal behind the 4-dr jeep and the proliferation of 3rd rows in midsize SUVs. The fact that you're still getting downvoted for saying it speaks volumes.
>the proliferation of 3rd rows in midsize SUVs.
Ehh, 3 row minivans are typically more practical. Alas, market forces are a fickle beast.
some guy left a few hundred pounds of steel in the loading area of my workshop for stupid reasons. maybe about $80 worth in scrap. he kept coming by and claiming someone was going to pick up it up, and getting really threatening about us stealing the value from him. the scrap yard is 200 ft away. he drives a big jacked up truck. after a couple weeks of this I'm like 'look, I'll cut it down, and we can throw it in that truck of yours and you can roll 200ft down the road and we'll be done with it'. he was incensed, his bed liner would get all scratched up.
after that I dragged it out onto the curb for the meth addicts to sell.
I find it somewhat amusing that this attracts a lot of ire, but most of us would prefer a 2,000+ sq ft suburban home with a lawn when we could live comfortably in a 500-700 sq ft apartment, like people do in most European cities.
Ultimately, life in highly developed countries is largely about the wants, not the needs, and different cultures emphasize different wants. The tech culture of the SF Bay Area doesn't glamorize big trucks, but it glamorizes making millions of dollars with no regard for privacy or social impacts of the tech we build.
You're not allowed to speak the truth against group think.
For many people, their emotions are more important than being rational.
Gas vehicles suffer from that range reduction, too, as my brother-in-law learned the hard way last weekend during a road trip we took to Idaho and back (wherein he was towing a camper-trailer).
There are a ton of people that want an affordable ICE powered truck, for a variety of valid and invalid reasons. The market is there, but they're going to need to be smart about how they do this if they want to capture that market.
I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn’t an ev. Very aggressive price point for a new IC vehicle.
I agree though I kinda wish it was a hybrid. Maybe down the line that will happen. The price point is a valid point and it ticks all our boxes - 4WD, manual transmission, not huge. I've priced out components for one of my trucks and $21500 is not gonna buy all of the running gear. I expect that none of this truck's drivetrain will use custom parts and that all of the critical drivetrain parts will come from existing supply lines for simplicity and ease of hitting their "repair in your driveway" messaging.
The guy is probably gauging interest through reservations and prepping his lie sheet (marketing data) to present to existing supply chain providers to try to earn discounts on volume orders.
I hope it all works. We will likely reserve one or maybe two. Our existing small truck, a 4WD Ford Ranger with manual transmission, is long in the tooth and I'm tired of dicking around with it.
A hybrid drive train would have increased the price though, which seems to be a major selling point if this.
I agree on both points. They are testing the waters and trying to get a foot in the door. Starting with a gasser only configuration gets them into production with enough interest from people who would like a smaller truck at a lower price point.
I don't think any reasonable person expects the price of the 2-door truck to be $21500 when it finally is produced. That price is guaranteed to rise between now and the delivery of the first vehicle in 2028, it it ever happens. For potential customers it is a signal that they are committed to delivering a quality vehicle at a low price point. If you read the privacy policy, the reservation agreement, and payment terms it is all laid out in plain english.
Once they get vehicles on the road and a dedicated owner base they can determine whether there is interest in a hybrid drivetrain model. I understand why they aren't offering it right out of the gate. I do expect that they would be willing to consider it in the future should they ever make the leap from marketing vaporware to manufacturing.
Kind of like the Local Motors Rally Fighter, which was a kit car that kept costs down by using parts from existing cars instead of designing their own from scratch.
A bit like that. I don't see a new vehicle manufacturer spending the time or capital to develop drivetrain components when there are already trusted manufacturers with decades of experience and products on the shelf that already function perfectly together.
I expect this guy will be looking at reliability data for various components, popular aftermarket upgrades, etc and designing a drivetrain that already uses popular components known by the automotive community to be reliable. Otherwise he will have a hard time hitting the 500k mile target I think I saw on the site.
He needs a dependable I4 engine mated to a dependable 6-spd manual transmission, mated to a dependable transfer case that sends power to the wheels through dependable differentials. I bet one could pull data from off-roader forums and configure something in a couple of days for their marketers to build interest.
> I wonder what it's like launching a gas truck when new battery-powered trucks are looming in the distance (or already here).
Yeah it’s interesting to see how they do. The big and award winning electric truck from Ford is already discontinued. If we’re talking about US pickups how many other ones are battery powered? If anything, I would be more worried about Slate given what happened to Ford Lightning.
There is a market for it. Cheap. Good range on a tank. 4WD. I've got a 2016 Tacoma TRD Offroad. It's only got about 115k miles (bought it new). I'm not planning on replacing it - toyota hybrid numbers for their trucks suck and an in kind replacement would cost me almost 2x what I originally paid (yes new tech, blahblah). $35k in 2015, $70+k now. Gas isn't going away and rural areas (I've lived in a few) often don't have charging options.
I was at the Toyota dealership today. A TRD off-road with TRD Off-Road Upgrade Package and other goodies has a MSRP of $61k and the tag hanging from the rear view mirror said the no haggle price was $54,608. Still a lot of money and it is a huge truck for the passenger and cargo payload.
https://www.smarttoyota.com/new-Madison-2026-Toyota-Tacoma-T...
My numbers were based on when I was looking, not current Trump f’d up weird economy.
Slate already has that covered.
I say this as someone who will be buying an EV as his next vehicle:
EV proponents have a strong propensity to gloss over the very real drawbacks of battery-only vehicles:
- Towing anything outside of charging infrastructure/away from the highway rest stops is not feasible because of the range reduction, which in USA/Canada is a major reason to buy an SUV/pickup. Why buy an electric vehicle that can't tow your boat to the lake where there's no charger?
- Mileage goes down in the summer and way down in the winter, because the battery packs need to be cooled/warmed.
- Mileage evaporates slowly, even when the vehicle is "off", making these vehicles fundamentally unsuitable for, again, going pretty much anywhere you can't plug it in. When I was a teen we used to take week-long canoe trips into Algonquin Park. Imagine trying to get the kids home from camping on Sunday afternoon, you're an hour's drive away from the nearest city but oops the battery pack is dead because it's been self-discharging and cooling itself the whole time you've been camping. No thanks.
- Venturing far away from the charging infrastructure (camping, rural road tripping, jobsites/camp) is risky. If you run out of gas in the middle of nowhere, you can get a ride into town, fill up a jerrycan with gas, and then extricate your vehicle. If your battery-only EV runs out of charge in the middle of nowhere, you are completely fucked.
EVs are great, and when my 2013 TDI finally quits I will likely purchase an EV, but they're just fundamentally unsuitable for some use cases.
> Venturing far away from the charging infrastructure (camping, rural road tripping, jobsites/camp) is risky. If you run out of gas in the middle of nowhere, you can get a ride into town, fill up a jerrycan with gas, and then extricate your vehicle.
A 5KW generator costs less than 2% of the price of the average new vehicle and is a useful thing to have in a place that doesn't otherwise have any electricity regardless.
Meanwhile you then don't have to buy gas the 99% of the time you're not camping.
Would be best to have a modular generator for an EV, that would allow slower but practical charging while on the go or at rest. This would be basically a series hybrid with modular generator, not popular due to lower efficiency AFAIU. Just explicitly design for lower performance when battery critically low and is charging on the go.
These are called EREVs in China and are fairly popular. Ford has a patent for one in trucks but never built it. It makes a ton of sense. Use the generator to get extended range, but avoid all the moving parts of a driveline.
Stellantis almost built one, I think the Ramcharger?
A couple other companies tried EREVs but AFAIR one was suboptimal (Mazda had one but the motor was so small it was dangerous to use for uphill) and the other was in an expensive German thing.
Where it is challenging is that, AFAIK, a direct driveline (i.e. Honda's system) or close to (THS used by Toyota/Ford/Subaru/others), it is easier to hit a higher Gas-only MPG rating than with an EREV due to the conversion losses on each end.
And, If you compare a BYD Seal 5 DM-i to the Current Prius Prime, AFAIK if you compare euro WLTP numbers the Prime gets better MPG when it switches to gas, and has a competitive electric only range. The Seal 5 DM-I is a little bigger but close enough. The BYD certainly wins on 'price' however it is unclear how much of that is due to a truly simpler design versus labor/material input cost.
You said it yourself, they're fundamentally suitable for most use cases. Yes, for the near future, there will be many use cases where gas is superior.
There are use cases for public transport. There are usecases for trucks and SUVs. EVs currently seem to be limited to a "city car" role, which is a category that's hard to understand.
Sure. But I think the "near future" to which you're referring is going to be a longer tail than many EV maximalists expect.
I would be shocked if IC-engined vehicles were no longer being produced in 2050.
There will be a tipping point where production and wide distribution of petrol and diesel becomes unsustainably expensive; it really relies on massive volume to work at all.
My pickup truck burned 9 miles per gallon when I towed a 35 foot RV. Consider the energy flux and you'll quickly see how hopeless it would be to tow with a battery powered truck.
Not everyone who owns a pickup tows with it. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a minority of owners who do. Some just need them for hauling plywood, others because they like the aesthetics.
A Honda minivan can fit 4x8 sheets of plywood in the dry, under-roof, with the doors closed. Other times, it can seat 8.
Unfortunately, to Americans, that really doesn't matter. Even if they're not as fit for purpose, they prefer pickup trucks to minivans. It's a cultural thing.
(I realize you're probably being responsive to the word "need" - it's more what they claim they need than actually need. They could use a Japanese kei truck.)
Am American. Need work vehicle that can move some stuff that might be fairly big. Minivan is solution. It does the job very well.
If I needed to move more stuff, then the best answer still isn't a pickup truck. It is instead a full-size van (Transit/Express/Sprinter/ProMaster).
Kei trucks seem cool, but they're still trucks. Whatever's in the back is open to the elements, looky-loos, and thieves. Those concerns are greatly diminished with vans.
(A pickup truck with a cap on it that never comes off is a lot like a minivan is, but with more steps.)
>They could use a Japanese kei truck.
I was hearing elsenet from someone who was planning to buy a Japanese kei truck until he borrowed one. Apparently with more than about 300 lb in the bed they feel dangerous to drive- combination of instability and poor braking performance.
At what speed, I wonder? In Japan I don’t think I ever saw one fully laden that was going faster than 40km/h (25mph).
He was saying 35-40 mph on small rural roads.
The venn diagram overlap between people who say "but minivans" and who hand wring hard enough to start a fire when someone has the gall to actually put 2000lb of stuff in a minivan or put a butt in every seat is too close to a circle for my liking.
Source: Minivan owner
Also minivan owner. In terms of weight, it's pretty similar to a RAM 1500 in its ability to handle the gravity of its contents. I regularly move about a thousand pounds of stuff across the country without any issues.
I wouldn't expect it to work with 8 full-sized American adults over that kind of distance: The adults would kill eachother, removing load as it happens. But it seems fine for quick trips in town.
Being enclosed, as it is, does suck for moving things like sofas, but: On the rare occasion that I have needed to move a sofa, truck owners have always lined up to demonstrate the superiority of their road-going machines.
(And that's all fine. I didn't want to move the sofa by myself, anyway.)
The Ford F-150 Lightning should be selling well, but it isn't