The Rumble Bee is just the start of this week’s Ram news…
Stellantis is having its annual Investor Day presentation, and in it is a whack of new product news across all of the company’s 14 brands. Here at TFLtruck, though, we’re particularly interested in Ram news — and today’s announcements more or less confirm and coalesce all the buzz floating around concerning the brand’s near-term future.
Long story short: From the smallest trucks to the largest, something is happening at Ram with all of them over the next four years.
The compact Rampage, manufactured and sold in Brazil, will in fact come to North America after all. Above that, the Dakota will arrive right alongside the Rampage around 2028. Now, we knew the Dakota was already coming after brand CEO Tim Kuniskis confirmed it a few months back. What we didn’t know until now, however, is that the Dakota will get a performance-minded SRT variant. Following up the recent Ram 1500 Rumble Bee family announcement, offering street trucks from the 5.7-liter Hemi through the 6.4-liter 392 and the 6.2-liter supercharged flagship, it’s clear SRT is back and is taking the entire North American model range by storm.
For the Dakota, the most obvious port of call for an SRT model would, in fact, be a Hemi V8 under the hood. That would give the midsize segment a proper muscle truck (and the first V8 midsize since the last Dakota’s departure in 2011), but we’ll have to wait and see exactly how those details shake out. Stellantis’ smaller vehicles will sit on a new platform called STLA One, which the automaker is billing as more of a one-size-fits-all solution for modular offerings across all its brands. So, that opens the door to pretty much anything from a unibody hybrid Dakota to a potential body-on-frame V8 muscle truck. STLA Frame, for its part, will still exist for the larger trucks, which I’ll get to in a moment.
When it does arrive on the market, Kuniskis noted it will start under $40,000.
Get ready for the Rampage!
The Dakota isn’t the only smaller Ram truck on the way, as it turns out. While we’ve been speculating about what the brand’s game plan is in the space over the past several years, the answer to “will Ram bring a Dakota or a Rampage to the U.S.” is apparently both.
Sitting below the Dakota and the rest of Ram’s trucks, the Rampage will be essentially identical to what’s available in South America. That includes a four-cylinder Hurricane engine, at least as its gasoline option. That engine is also in widespread use here in the U.S., so the only big question remaining is where a North American version would be built. Since simply importing the Rampage from Brazil would subject it to the 25% Chicken Tax, Stellantis may work out production here in America.
We have more on the smaller Rampage in another TFLtruck post here.
And there’s a Ramcharger, too…
Outside the Dakota, the Ramcharger is probably the second worst-kept secret over the past couple years about new vehicles Ram has in the works. Now, we have clear and unequivocal confirmation that a full-size SUV is finally coming to the Ram brand, and it will wear that Ramcharger name. We suspected as much when the brand shifted around its electrified Ram 1500-based trucks to make the former Ram 1500 Ramcharger REEV (range-extended EV) to become the Ram 1500 REV. That freed up the Ramcharger name for use here.
Now, the upcoming Ramcharger will, like the olden days, ride on the same platform as its truck siblings (and the Jeep Grand Wagoneer, for that matter). The first Ramcharger first came to market in 1974 as a response to the Chevy Blazer K5, and today’s battle will more or less carry on in that tradition, as the new version will take on heavyweights like the Tahoe and Suburban. It probably won’t have a removable top like the original Ramcharger did, that said, but you know how it goes. You can’t have everything, right?
Updated versions of Ram’s existing trucks and new vans are on the way, too
Over the next four years, Stellantis announced plans to invest 60 billion Euros into its turnaround strategy. New product is obviously a big part of that, but Ram will also update its existing trucks, as well. That includes new versions of the half-ton Ram 1500 and heavy-duty trucks later in the decade, as well as a new version of the ProMaster, alongside the recently debuted ProMaster City.
Of course, all this news comes with the caveat that this is the plan by 2030. Plans are subject to change, as are time frames. Nevertheless, if everything does pan out on the schedule laid out during the Investor Day, we’ll have a ton of Ram news coming up over the next couple years!
