Ram’s Money Boss Admits Brand Sorely Needs Cheaper Trucks
It didn’t take long after the launch of the refreshed and updated 2025 Ram 1500 for the company to slash prices as sales kept falling. That was in mid-October of last year, yet the full-size pickup still suffered a 7-percent decline in the U.S. and over 20 percent in Canada during the fourth quarter.
Meanwhile, the Ram 1500 Classic (based on the previous generation) officially ended production, denying potential customers a more affordable option.
Now led once again by Tim Kuniskis, who came out of six-month retirement in December, Ram needs to find solutions. Chief Financial Officer Doug Ostermann admitted this week at a Wolfe Research conference that the brand desperately needs a new, less expensive full-size pickup to offset the departure of the Ram 1500 Classic. Demand is strong, he said.
“We need to introduce kind of a lower-end trim of the new pickup to fill that gap,” Ostermann told the audience according to Bloomberg, although he made it clear that such a truck wouldn’t be coming “immediately.”
Picture a current-generation Ram 1500 with a more basic design and equipment, inevitably with the 3.6-litre Pentastar V6 under the hood, maybe even with the 5.7-litre HEMI V8. It looks like the latter will return to the lineup sometime in 2025, as The Car Guide has learned from credible sources. It would presumably be cheaper to build than the new twin-turbocharged inline six-cylinder engine a.k.a. Hurricane.
In related news, don’t forget that the United Auto Workers (UAW) confirmed in January that Stellantis has committed to reopen the Belvidere, Illinois assembly plant and build a new midsize pickup starting in 2027. While the Jeep Gladiator is manufactured in Ohio, the future model to come out of Illinois will be the Ram midsize truck that consumers and dealers have been asking for since the discontinuation of the Dakota in 2011.
