The Ramcharger has been set up to fail

Hi. My name is Byron and I’m a Ramcharger truther.

I’m telling you right now that the single most important launch in the year of our Lord 2024 is the 2025 Ram 1500 Ramcharger. I don’t just want Ram’s range-extended electric truck to succeed; I feel somewhere deep in my soul that it must. And on it, I’m hinging the hopes of myself and everybody else who, for the love of all things worthy and decent, wants to see America’s most profitable segment take just one iiiiiitty-bitty swig from the plug-in keg. And in a market where beggars can’t be choosers, the Ramcharger is the next-best thing. And I stand ready to give up my last full measure of rhetorical devotion in its defense.

I get it. The “typical” pickup buyer isn’t clamoring for electrification, but it should not have taken this long for us to get some form of plug-in pickup. And let’s get something straight here: No buying segment is nearly as monolithic as that notion would suggest — certainly not one as large as the pickup market. More than 2.8 million Americans bought new trucks in 2023; it would only require a take rate of 1% to create a market bigger than Dodge’s entire brand footprint. Were buyers crying out for the Wrangler 4xe? Its runaway success made it the country’s best-selling plug-in (an honor it still holds) pretty much overnight.

And bluntly, there’s no more perfect candidate for a plug-in setup than a pickup. Trucks are big and offer plenty of options for clever battery integration while still leaving adequate space for a fuel tank. Plus, as we saw from even the (not-a-plug-in) hybrid Ford F-150, there are myriad practical advantages to the inclusion of what amounts to an onboard gasoline generator. And more than that, plug-ins are simple, especially in longitudinal platforms. If you look at the diagram of Jeep’s 4xe, the electric motor just looks like a giant starter hooked up to a battery by really wicked jumper cables.

I’m not saying that we should have already had a plug-in pickup by now — I’m saying we should have had 10. Some good, maybe some not so good. The market should be a generation or more deep in sales data and customer feedback. We should know by now exactly what the plug-in customer wants — how big the battery should be and by extension, how small the fuel tank. Instead, America’s first mainstream pickup truck with both a plug and a gasoline engine is a “Choose Your Own Adventure” volume with a $60,000 starting price.