Ram’s 1500 Ramcharger goes on sale later this year, and the company is taking a slightly different approach to its electrified truck than rivals Ford and General Motors, which both now offer battery electric pickups. The Ramcharger will be a range-extended EV, albeit one with more lithium-ion on board than most BEVs have.
Honestly, pickup trucks are a poor candidate for electrification, at least while we’re still firmly in early adopter territory. The instant and impressive torque from an electric motor is great, but the shape of a cab and bed is inherently draggy in a way that few other vehicles are, a problem exacerbated by whopping great frontal areas.
But the pickup truck is also the most popular kind of vehicle in the US, and the industry has tried very hard to convince itself and everyone else that pickup buyers could seamlessly adopt electric powertrains en masse. That way, everyone in America could drive an EV, climate change would go away, and no one would have to consider changing their lifestyle or taking a bus to work.
If battery prices had fallen the way we were told they were going to, that future might have been more likely. But they haven’t—a point made by Ram CEO Tim Kuniskis. “We thought a few years ago that the costs were transitory,” Kuniskis said. “Some people were saying less than $50 per kilowatt-hour. Now we know that that turned out to not be transitory, and we’re nowhere near that today, so the cost versus ICE [internal combustion engine] is significantly more expensive.”
As a result, the full BEV version of the Ramcharger, which was due to use a whopping 229 kWh battery, has been shelved. At 92 kWh, the pack in the range-extended Ramcharger is pretty darn big on its own, but it should still allow Ram to sell it for less than $70,000, Kuniskis said.
The choice of engine for the range extender will help keep those costs down. Unlike most hybrids, the ICE here isn’t an Atkinson cycle engine. “Atkinson cycle engines are very good at light engine loads,” explained Ram chief engineer Joe Tolkacz. “So if you’re in a normal hybrid with a small battery, one kilowatt or so, that’s a really good engine choice. We have almost 100 times that in our battery. So we’re not going to be running the engine at light loads. We’re going to be running at only heavier loads where the engine is more efficient.”
