News & Reviews- Make: Ram

Since Ram adopted the big rig look back in '93, they've been a solid number three instead of a distant third here in Canada, even as recently as calendar year 2014 coming very close to toppling combined Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra sales. Ram missed achieving this feat by a mere 1,484 models, which would be a significant margin if we were comparing Chevy Malibu to Chrysler 200 sales, but in the Canadian half-ton market where the two GM pickups found 90,005 new owners to the Ram 1500's 88,521 buyers, it was losing by a hair.

The Chrysler 200 ended up 3,409 units in the clear for calendar 2014, incidentally, but with 11,655 200 sales to the Malibu's 8,246 deliveries you get my point. This is where I'd like to say something witty like, GM had better watch out or Ram's trucks will soon oust them for second spot overall, but as it is the General's 6,237 unit lead as of October 2015 is probably too much for Ram to overcome in the next two months. This no doubt comes as a bit Read Full Story

So who's kicking half-ton pickup truck butt in the Canadian market these days? If you guessed Ford with its F-Series you'd be right, but Chevy is no longer number two. That spot has actually belonged to Ram for some time.

It takes two General Motors brands to push Ram off the second-place podium, and not by much. The Ram brand sold 88,521 pickup trucks in Canada last year, an improvement of more than 10 percent compared to 2013. It'll no doubt be some time before Ram gets close enough to Ford for it to even see the big blue oval on the backside of an F-Series truck, but it's been outselling both Chevy Silverado and GMC Sierra trucks since 2010, the GM models only achieving 41,959 and 48,046 Canadian sales respectively last year for a total of just 90,005, only 1,484 units more than Ram. At the rate Ram is growing it may not be long before it passes right on by the General's combined dual-brand pickup sales, which may cause some soul searching in Oshawa. Just in case you were Read Full Story

One summer, when I was around ten years old, my uncle decided to drive us from the Croatian coast to the Alps of Slovenia. A wonderful vacation, though I still remember gagging on diesel fumes as we followed a string of heavily laden trucks along a mountain pass. We couldn't have imagined that in just a few decades, Dr. Diesel's engine would reach today's level of civility.

Dr. Rudolph Diesel either fell, was pushed, or jumped from the deck of a cross-Channel ferry while on his way to England. That was September 29, 1913, some time before his patented engine design became successful. The motor mounted in the Ram 1500 Diesel would have surely done the good doctor proud, it is a gem of a powerplant, ideally suited to light and medium duty trucks. The basic design has been proven over the years in European utility vehicles. In current form it produces 420 lb-ft of torque, the pulling power you need for both work and play. Measured fuel economy during my test, which included some Read Full Story

If you haven't seen or heard the ads for Ram's 1500 pickup truck you must be a media hermit. No matter where I turn I'm reminded that the new Ram 1500 delivers "the best fuel economy of any full-size pickup, ever!" This claim is for the new EcoDiesel model mind you, a vehicle we'll cover in another review shortly. The Ram 1500 that's being reviewed here is a nicely featured 1500 Outdoorsman 4x4 model with the surprisingly potent and also thrifty 3.6-litre Pentastar V6.

Right off the top the Ram 1500's base engine is a charmer, with a nice easy-revving feel and better refinement than any of its rivals' entry-level V6s. What's more, at 305 horsepower Ram's V6 puts out almost as much force as one competitor's base V8 and all comparative V6s, while its 269 lb-ft of torque is not quite as ballsy as the competition but it should be ample for light-duty work and play. The real dealmaker is the transmission that comes mated to this engine, an ultra-smooth, super-efficient TorqueFlite Read Full Story

Perhaps no North American automotive category reflects the European influence so clearly these days as the commercial van segment. It was the former DaimlerChrysler group that really started the trend when it brought over its big Sprinter van from Europe. The Sprinter helped break up the old hierarchy that saw traditional full-size vans dominating the marketplace, with cube vans and commercialized passenger minivans filling in the larger and smaller niches.

Being much more versatile than a cube van, the Sprinter sold well enough to scavenge sales from the slightly smaller full-size vans and prompt manufacturers such as Nissan to bring over their own European-style full size vans. The combination of falling sales for traditional full-size vans and increasingly strict CAFE fuel-economy standards prompted General Motors to drop its 1500-series Express and Savana vans for 2015 and introduce the Chevrolet City Express to fill the need for a small, fuel-efficient yet capable work van. Read Full Story