Yahoo Autos 2025 Ram 1500 Pickup Muscles Up
Traditionalism, in the car business, is often a euphemism for corporate penury. "Our buyers are very traditionalist," a car company will say, by way of explaining its continued deployment of some Bronze Age technology that should've been jettisoned decades before. Sometimes, there's a kernel of truth in there—certain Porsche fans still mistrust the dark magic of water-cooled engines—but more often the company in question simply amortized research and development costs long ago and is thus happy to keep furnishing leaf springs or drum brakes or hit-and-miss engines to its supposedly traditionalist buyers. Ram doesn't play that game, as evidenced by the 2025 Ram 1500 and its quiver of new engines, none of which is a V-8. That's right: The company that sent Jon Reep to stardom with the question "That thing got a Hemi?" no longer offers Hemis in its new pickup. What it does offer is a furious twin-turbocharged 3.0-liter inline-six, and we suspect that 540 horsepower will make its own argument to the pickup faithful. Out with the Hemi, long live the Hurricane.
New Hurricane Six in Two Strengths
Yes, the new 3.0-liter has a cool name, because Stellantis is not going to give an engine some bland alphanumeric moniker when it can invoke a terror-inducing natural disaster. In the Ram 1500, the Hurricane comes in two flavors, with the middle-of-the-lineup engine making 420 horsepower and 469 pound-feet of torque, improving on the 2024 truck's 5.7-liter V-8 by 25 horsepower and 59 pound-feet. That alone is a worthy upgrade, but there's also a high-output version that cranks out 540 horsepower and 521 pound-feet. The ZF-sourced eight-speed automatic returns, sending power to a stronger rear axle designed to cope with the Hurricanes' mountain of torque.
Both engines get a closed-deck block and a forged steel crankshaft, with the high-output employing forged aluminum pistons as well. There are two turbochargers, each fed by three cylinders and enjoying its own exhaust plumbing—true three-inch dual exhaust, all the way back. The standard Hurricane makes 22.4 psi of peak boost, while the high-output's turbos huff 28.0 psi into the intake manifold. To address an obvious question here: Yes, you'll need to run premium fuel to hit those published power numbers. Both engines will run fine on 87 octane but will generate power figures that Ram representatives defined as "less." (Fuel economy is still to be determined, but Ram hopes for an improvement over the V-8.) To assuage worries that the wee six is overmatched for truck duty, Ram showed a video of the engine undergoing the company's most diabolical dyno test, in which the throttle is pinned while the entire engine is tossed around violently in a motorized cradle. If you somehow get your truck on the track at Millennium Force at Cedar Point, oil starvation will be the least of your worries.
The Hurricane, in one strength or the other, is available on every trim, and there are plenty of those. As before, the Tradesman is the value-oriented work truck, and the carryover 305-hp 3.6-liter V-6 is standard. But the standard-output Hurricane is optional, as it is on the next trim level up the ladder, the Big Horn/Lonestar. From there, the off-road-oriented Rebel and the fancier Laramie are both exclusively powered by the 420-hp Hurricane, while the Limited, Limited Longhorn, and Tungsten—the new flagship model—are graced with the 540-hp version.
That's a lot of bandwidth in a single lineup, from a $42,000 work truck to an $89,000 luxury chariot. If you opt for a base-model truck, the 2025 model isn't a wild departure from the 2024. Most of the body panels carry over, save for a subtle front- and rear-end restyling that brings standard LED headlights. But a Tungsten is like a different truck entirely, with its BMW M3–shaming engine, hands-free driver assist, 24-way power seats with massage, and 23-speaker Klipsch sound system. Come to think of it, the Tungsten not only makes more power than an M3 Competition, but it costs more too. Whatever the ceiling is on the half-ton truck market's appetite for decadence, Ram thinks we haven't found it yet.
