The Ram TRX had put the Ford F-150 Raptor to shame with its Hellcat V8 engine, but the Ram 1500 RHO with its six-cylinder engine gives Ford a direct competitor to its benchmark.
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The Ram TRX and the Hellcat V8 don't go together anymore. For months now. Ram just revealed a pseudo-replacement for the super-truck called the RHO, and from the outside, it's almost identical. The styling is nearly identical, the suspension is nearly identical, and all the stats that really matter for off-roading are identical. But the RHO is powered by a twin-turbocharged inline-six engine rather than a naturally aspirated V8.
The TRX was always touted as a competitor to the Ford F-150 Raptor. It had 35-inch tires, a widebody, and an impressive adaptive suspension. However, due to its massive power advantage—702 hp compared to the Ford’s 450 hp—it was never a proportional comparison. Of course, Ford stepped up and started selling its own Raptor R with a supercharged V8 a few years ago, but that’s a different beast. That vehicle costs $110,000 and now exists in a class of its own.
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You could tell the TRX's engine did it a lot of good. It would be wrong to say the truck was bad otherwise—indeed, it was amazing in every sense of the word—but all that power meant it wouldn't matter so much if everything else was a little inefficient. That was largely the policy of everyone who put the Hellcat on.
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The RHO doesn't enjoy that same advantage. It's more comparable to the mass-produced F-150 Raptor that continues to dominate dirt trails and sales brochures. With this new six-cylinder truck, Ram is taking on the industry standard head-on.
It comes with everything the big TRX did, minus the Hellcat V8 engine, though it still packs more power than the Raptor. Despite being smaller in displacement than the Raptor's 3.5-liter EcoBoost V6, the 3.0-liter Hurricane makes 540 horsepower and 521 lb-ft of torque thanks to 26 pounds of boost. Its internals are refined, its lubrication system is upgraded, and it's liquid-cooled.
The two trucks take a similar approach to suspension tuning, with a few differences. Arguably the biggest is the Bilstein Blackhawk e2 with their adjustable dampers and independent reservoirs compared to the Raptor and its Fox Live Valve shocks. Both take input from various vehicle systems to adjust rebound and compression almost instantly on the fly, but the Bilsteins use remote independent reservoirs. Both wear independent suspension up front, although the Ram uses forged aluminum upper and lower arms. On the Raptor, only the lower arms are aluminum while the uppers are steel.
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Many of the RHO's other stats come close to the Raptor's, if not surpassing them. The Ram has 11.8 inches of ground clearance on 35-inch Goodyear Wrangler AT tires; the Ford has 12 inches flat with 35-inch BF Goodrichs and 13.1 inches with 37-inchers. The Ram has 14 inches of rear suspension; the Raptor manages 15 inches. These are small differences that most people won't notice behind the wheel, but they are differences nonetheless.
One key contrast that everyone will notice is the cost. The Ram 1500 RHO and all its power starts at $71,990 — $8,335 less than the F-150 Raptor. At such a high cost, money may seem like a small reason to choose one over the other, but that's a 10% gap. It's hard not to be swayed by it at least a little.
We'll have to see how customers respond to the RHO, but we're putting our money on Ram. In the US, you see a TRX every time you go into town, and now that it's selling for almost $30,000 less than the final-year Hellcat truck, volume will likely remain high. Americans love their high-powered pickups, and the Ram RHO is emerging as one of the best.
Source: thedrive
