Filed under: Truck, Work, New Car Reviews, Off-Road, Ram
Enough Is Enough. Finally.
Not long ago, the efforts of an automaker to put a six-cylinder engine into a pickup truck went something like this: take the basic bread-and-butter V8, lop two cylinders off one end of the block and call it a day. The resulting engines were generally pretty rough around the edges, and while they were able to churn out reasonable amounts of torque, they generally weren’t good at anything else. Instead of being smooth running, they shook and shimmied; in place of a quiet highway jaunt, they operated well outside their low-rpm comfort zones and sent a corresponding racket throughout the cabin. And, instead of returning significantly superior fuel economy over their V8 counterparts, they guzzled gas and spat noxious vapors out their tailpipes.
In other words, the only reason to choose the base V6 engine over an optional V8 was to save money on the initial purchase, and that usually meant you’d be driving home in a stripped-out machine and would be lucky to have power windows, cruise control and air conditioning.
Those days are long gone, and good riddance, we say. Today’s lineup of full-size trucks are better in every way than ever before, from styling and safety to towing and overall performance. And, for the first time ever, fuel efficiency is a primary selling point for V6-powered pickups. But how does a new, modern-day truck with a V6 engine work in the real world? Does it deliver on the promises of decent efficiency, refined driving manners and adequate performance (both around town and when put to work) all for a palatable price? We spent back-to-back weeks with two 2013 Ram 1500 pickups to find out, one with a Hemi V8 and one with a 3.6-liter Pentastar V6. Read on, faithful truck buyers.
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2013 Ram 1500 originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 06 Aug 2013 11:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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