Ram EV Appears Imminent for 2024 Model Year
Lost in the shuffle about Stellantis’ EV Day yesterday — and the weird slogans, especially the Dodge eMuscle thing — was another bit of news we weren’t able to get to yesterday.
Ram has an EV truck planned for 2024.
It’s all part of Stellantis’ plan to have EV coverage in every segment by 2030.
The truck will be body-on-frame and Ram is claiming up to 500 miles in range.
Predictably, Ram has released few other details other than a promise to outdo the planned EV trucks from rivals Ford and Chevrolet. That would mean beating Ford’s promises of up to 300 miles of range and up to 10,000 lbs of towing capacity from the upcoming Lightning.
For its part, General Motors says its Silverado electric is targeting 400 miles of range and an on-sale date of 2023 or 2024.
Ram did make mention of on-board power, fast charging of up to 150 kWh, some sort of advanced autonomous driving, and navigation that plans routes based on range and charger ability. A plug-in hybrid was also mentioned.
It’s good to see that no matter how the transition to EVs plays out, the truck wars remain alive and well.
[Image: Ram]
Tim Healey grew up around the auto-parts business and has always had a love for cars — his parents joke his first word was “‘Vette”. Despite this, he wanted to pursue a career in sports writing but he ended up falling semi-accidentally into the automotive-journalism industry, first at Consumer Guide Automotive and later at Web2Carz.com. He also worked as an industry analyst at Mintel Group and freelanced for About.com, CarFax, Vehix.com, High Gear Media, Torque News, FutureCar.com, Cars.com, among others, and of course Vertical Scope sites such as AutoGuide.com, Off-Road.com, and HybridCars.com. He’s an urbanite and as such, doesn’t need a daily driver, but if he had one, it would be compact, sporty, and have a manual transmission.
More by Tim Healey
Comments
Join the conversation
Imminent 2024 It's 2021 Tim.
Ford set the bar pretty high with the Lightning. They made sure it was a real truck first, and showed how going electric opens up a bunch of new opportunities, from worksite power to powering your home in an outage. Hopefully Ram and GM also come up with work first designs, and develop some innovative uses for the EV tech that you can't do with an ICE truck.
I thought of a good question to start asking EV makers. A number that should be on the vehicles window sticker. The expected life of the cells in charge cycles. It's a known number and gives a buyer information needed to make a purchase. I monitor battery patents and one of the things you see is additives that increase cell life. If a consumer is looking at 2 competing trucks at the same price, it would be good to know if one truck had a 500 cycle capacity and the other 800 or 1000. On a 300 mile range truck, 500 cycles is 150,000 miles and 800 is 240,000 miles. They test the cells and know what the numbers are for a particular formulation. They should disclose those numbers.
All I know is that we need some nuclear power plants pronto. We kind of learned that that wind and solar crap isn't the answer...at least not yet. Not at the scale we need them to be.