The Ram Power Wagon Is an Irrationally Wonderful Tow Vehicle

From Road & Track

"Did you say… a Power Wagon?" It certainly sounded like our Web Supremo, Travis Okulski, had just said "We have a Power Wagon," but I wanted to make sure. I'd been looking for a truck to tow my Plymouth Neon race car to last month's American Endurance Racing event at New Jersey Motorsports Park. The "pull" was going to be particularly annoying and arduous: nearly six hundred miles up and down through the mountains of West Virginia, towing a U-Haul car carrier with the dreaded and feared inertia-based hydraulic brake system.

I'd asked Travis to find a nice ¾-ton truck to pull the Neon, preferably a RAM because it would keep to the Mopar theme. I'd been envisioning a Cummins-powered quad cab with a longbed. Something that would just shrug off the two-ton combined weight of our car and trailer, and with a nice long wheelbase to handle the drama of the U-Haul brake system. Just in case you've never had to pull a U-Haul car carrier, let me explain how it works. When you slow the truck down, the trailer keeps going. That motion moves a Rube Goldberg device that eventually applies hydraulic pressure to the trailer brakes. So every time you slow down, the trailer tries to ram you, then it brakes all of a sudden and jerks on the trailer hitch with the force of an adult Brachiosaurus.

I knew the RAM 2500-series trucks were up to the challenge, because I've used them before. What I didn't know was that Travis was busy finding us a Power Wagon. You can think of the Power Wagon as the natural enemy of the Ford F-150 Raptor, but that's not really a fair fight. The Raptor is optimized to jump over stuff, but the Power Wagon is designed to just bash its way through. It's a genuine ¾-ton truck where the Raptor is a half-ton. Nowadays, of course, every full-sized pickup you can buy massively exceeds its nominal capacity. The Power Wagon is no more a "three-quarter-ton" truck than a BMW 340i is a four-liter car.

Unlike the run-of-the-mill RAM 2500, the Power Wagon has solid axles front and rear, held up by Bilstein shocks. A series of skid plates protects the underside, and there's a 12,000-pound winch on the front bumper that, thankfully, was never used during our race weekend. Three Power Wagon trim levels are available; we had the middle one. With destination and a few options, it was just short of $55,000.

That's a lot of money for a truck, but in our long tow sessions the Power Wagon proved to be a lot of truck. To begin with, it has a trucked-up version of the almighty 392 HEMI engine, badged as "6.4" in this application and putting out 410 horsepower. It would be an understatement to say that it didn't particularly mind pulling the Neon on the trailer.

Up the steep hills around Parkersburg, WV, the Power Wagon proved capable of effortlessly accelerating to speeds that, ahem, were slightly greater than the posted limit on the fenders of the U-Haul trailer. The penalty for this was an instant-mileage readout that could hover at "3 MPG" for five or six minutes at a time. At one point, with the 392 spinning past 5000rpm and the traffic simply disappearing from the power-slider rear window, it registered just two miles per gallon. Presumably this is why people buy diesel pickups.

A series of problems with our car during the race weekend had us shedding the trailer and using the Power Wagon for all sorts of errands. It had the "Ram Box" cargo system which is a great way to store bottles of oil, brake fluid, and other things that shouldn't be in the passenger compartment but which also should not be bashing around an empty pickup bed. The Ram Boxes lock automatically with the key. You can laugh at the feature, or the name, but the Ram Box really works.

This was particularly true given the unpleasant height of the pickup bed. We get it: when you raise a truck high enough to survive the swamps, it's going to be a hassle to load up the bed. But that one factor would be enough for us to consider getting a Ram truck with slightly less off-road capability.

The cabin of the Power Wagon is a no-nonsense arrangement filled with brown cloth upholstery. It's very comfortable for four or five people, no matter how tall or large they are. The stereo's pretty decent, as well, even if I only ever used it to listen to SIRIUS 18, "Yacht Rock Radio".

The current generation of Ram truck handles pretty well and the Power Wagon is no exception; it's just higher off the ground and consequently a little slower to turn. There's so much power from the HEMI that it's tempting to drive the thing around like a Trophy Truck in traffic. Don't do that.

Like a Raptor, or a Corvette Z06, this is a very special-purpose vehicle for people who know exactly what they're buying and exactly what they want. We saw another Power Wagon on the road in Jersey; it was loaded to the roof inside and out with canoes and other outdoor adventure equipment. Obviously this thing could get you to most boat ramps and canoe launches.

We never even put the Power Wagon in four-wheel-drive; there really wasn't a need. But we did have a little off-road action with it. I was sitting in the truck during the race when our driver called in and said she was off the track and couldn't see a clear path to re-enter the racing surface. I tossed the Power Wagon in Drive and went hauling across the open fields towards the section of the track where she'd gone off. I'm not sure how fast I was going, but it took the rest of the team five whole minutes to catch up in a car. I can say that the truck was utterly unflappable at speeds that would have been a bit worrisome on an enduro motorcycle in the same conditions.

On the drive home, the U-Haul developed a bit of a wobble, but the Power Wagon just didn't care. The trip home was an uneventful as the trip out. Too bad our Neon wasn't quite as reliable as the truck that was pulling it; just four laps into the second day of racing, it overheated and had to be retired from the race. We didn't stick around to see who was going to win in our absence. Nine hours later, the Power Wagon was back at the rural shop where we store the car. A small crowd gathered and we thought they had questions about the race car, but they were there to see the high-riding Ram in the metal. Eveyrbody was a fan. We can't blame them.

Born in Brooklyn but banished to Ohio, Jack Baruth has won races on four different kinds of bicycles and in seven different kinds of cars. Everything he writes should probably come with a trigger warning. His column, Avoidable Contact, runs twice a week.