New Ram Truck: More Macho For The Money?
- Chrysler Group LLC
- The coming Ram Express pickup truck is aimed at young, first-time buyers.
Chrysler Group’s Ram truck brand has settled on a name for the next permutation of its full-size pickup truck. The new version, aimed at first-time buyers, will be called the Ram 1500 Express.
If you guessed the truck would be called the Adventurer you were not alone. The company in February said it was working on a possible new model using that codename. And if you ask me, the name better captures what people love about pickups and what compels young drivers, males in particular, to buy them whether they need them or not.
Ram says the idea behind the Express was to offer a large truck with a V8 engine and enough features to help it avoid the stripped-down-truck characterization. The new truck, which reaches dealerships later in the second quarter of this year, is essentially a replacement for the outgoing mid-size Dakota model the company used to court young buyers for the last two decades.
What Ram and other truck makers have found is that people shopping for pickups generally want a big vehicle and the rugged, resourceful and macho image that comes with them. Smaller trucks, while more than capable enough to handle most buyers’ requirements, completely lack the feeling of toughness and invulnerability people seem to feel at the wheel of a large truck.
Rivals Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Co. have also shifted marketing efforts away from smaller trucks in favor of their more appealing and profitable large models. Ram says the Express, which comes in a regular-cab, short-bed configuration, will start at $23,830 including a $975 destination charge. It is meant in part to undercut similar trucks from Ford and GM.
Now, back to the name. Ram, formerly Dodge, used the “Express” moniker on a 1978 truck called the “Li’l Red Express.” It had bright red paint, a logo with its name on the door and big-rig style vertical exhaust pipes that rose above the passenger cab.
Even as an 11-year-old caught up in the heart of the disco era, I thought the Express was super-cheesy. Of course, I’m now many years outside the company’s target demographic, and the new truck looks better than the old version. Still, I wish Ram had stuck with “Adventurer.”
http://blogs.wsj.com
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