2021 Ram 1500 TRX Yearlong Review Verdict: Too Much of a Great Thing?
The mighty TRX remains the supertruck we fell in love with, but the world has changed.
What a year it's been! It's been 16 months sinceMotorTrendtook possession of our long-term 2021 Ram 1500 TRX. Since that time, well, what's the line fromAnnie? It's been a hard knock life for our big, red truck. From day one, our poor Ram TRX has been put away wet. From towing a 392 Charger to a dragstrip, to being (nearly) overloaded and made to drive from Michigan to North Carolina, to covering 7,700 miles completely off-road across the country, to getting its face busted up by an electric truck, to towing horses, to being treated as a sports car, these past 16 months and 27,488 miles are among the toughest any of our long-termers has ever faced. But hey, it's a truck, ain't it? It was built to be beaten up.
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A caveat: Our TRX returned from our Rivian/Trans-America Trail adventure damaged. The list of woes was long (though, again, the abuse was heavy), so we took the extraordinary step of giving our truck back to Ram for a checkup. We wouldn't see our truck again for another four months. Not because the damage was so bad (a dented fender was about the worst of it), but it went in for repairs at the height of the pandemic-induced supply chain crisis. We waited months for a rear bumper. We'd like to be able to tell you everything Ram repaired on our TRX, but it rebuffed our accounting requests. Why? No clue. We never got a complete breakdown of everything that was repaired, either, so it's tough to speculate. I'd guesstimate the damage was about $20,000, though that's just a hunch.
To defend Ram a bit, 7,700 miles of overlanding off-road is not a normal use case for this truck, and if you're shopping for a TRX, just put the TAT adventure and the subsequent long repair out of your mind. As for what it cost us to run the TRX, normal maintenance hasn't been too bad. Just $617.73 for four oil changes, one tire rotation and one cabin air filter replacement. That's a touch more than our old Ram 2500 Power Wagon, which costs us $272.50 over three services and nearly 23,000 miles with us. However, the fuel costs are… shocking. Please be seated. Take a deep breath; I'll give you a minute. The TRX averaged 10.8 miles per gallon over those 27,488 miles and rang up $12,419.29 in fuel alone. Back when we voted the big Ram our 2021 Truck of the Year, the one criterion that gave us pause was efficiency. Specifically because the Ram didn't have any.
Here's the actual crazy part. According to our partners at IntelliChoice, even with all the miles this truck's residual value is $90,400. Our truck's sticker price? $91,185. Yes, the truck is worth over 99 percent of what it cost new. Insert head-exploding emoji here. That strikes me as absurd, especially because the car-buying canon maintains your car loses 33 percent of its value when you drive it off the lot. Seems that were we to have purchased our TRX and just parked it then sold it, we would have made a grip of cash. But then you wouldn't be reading any of this, would you?
As for life with the TRX beyond the numbers, it remains the supertruck we fell in love with two years ago. You'd never know by looking, but Ram's engineering team did a fantastic job tuning the suspension. Not just in terms of near-luxury levels of ride quality, but in terms of (totally preposterous) handling. Nearly every time I hopped aboard, I figured out a way to take a corner way too quickly just to experience the feel of the big Ram hunkering down and doing the impossible. The Ram is, after all, a giant toy, so its fun-to-drive factor ought to be higher than normal. Luckily, it totally is.
Aside from burning too much gas, the only real downside we detected was that the TRX makes a poor horse-hauler. Too bouncy for the ponies. The gargantuan Ram excelled at heading off-road (truly one of the best 4x4s you can buy), was shockingly great as a long-haul luxury cruiser, and with its massive cabin was quite a practical vehicle. For instance, I could easily put a whole week's worth of groceries on the floor of the back row. And I should say practical unless the TRX's absurd 88-inch width puts a damper on your parking plans at the market. Perfect? No, but man, is the Ram 1500 TRX one hell of a great truck.
But has the world moved on? I know, here he goes, Mr. EV is about to ruin everything. I get it, I do. No one wants electric vehicles shoved down their throats. Though, quite ironically and literally, no one stops and thinks about all the NOx being shoved down our collective throats by a gas guzzler like the TRX. Objectively speaking, 10.8 mpg over 27,488 miles is awful, and nearly $25K on gasoline is disturbing. Moreover, we are learning that not only are ICE vehicles worse for the environment than we once thought, but EVs are much cleaner (even factoring in battery production) much quicker into the ownership experience.
Moreover, the similarly priced Ford Lightning Platinum hits 60 mph in 4.0 seconds, whereas the just as capable (if not more so) off-road Rivian R1T smokes the TRX to 60 mph, doing so in 3.2 seconds when on off-road tires, versus 4.0 seconds for the TRX. It's a tenth quicker on street rubber. Not to be a fly in the punchbowl, but here we are. Had viable EV trucks not become a thing, I'd be sitting here typing out that the Ram TRX remains the greatest pickup truck ever built, a feeling I had until the very moment I first drove that darn Rivian. I suppose we can table this question until Ram launches its electric pickup truck within the next couple of years, because you know an EV TRX is not far behind.
For More on our long-term Ram 1500 TRX
- The Ram 1500 TRX Joins the MT Garage
- Which Is Quicker—a Charger SRT 392 Scat Pack or the TRX?
- …And What About a TRX or a Rivian R1T?
- The TRX Isn't a Great Forest Service Truck
- But It Is a Good Mudder
- Huge Power Saves This Ship
- Everything We Broke on Our Ram TRX Crossing the Country Off-Road
- Why the Ram TRX is the Ultimate Road Trip Rig
- 5 Miles Per Gallon. You Heard Me.
- Can The Ram Haul Horses?
When I was just one-year-old and newly walking, I managed to paint a white racing stripe down the side of my father’s Datsun 280Z. It’s been downhill ever since then. Moral of the story? Painting the garage leads to petrolheads. I’ve always loved writing, and I’ve always had strong opinions about cars.
One day I realized that I should combine two of my biggest passions and see what happened. Turns out that some people liked what I had to say and within a few years Angus MacKenzie came calling. I regularly come to the realization that I have the best job in the entire world. My father is the one most responsible for my car obsession. While driving, he would never fail to regale me with tales of my grandfather’s 1950 Cadillac 60 Special and 1953 Buick Roadmaster. He’d also try to impart driving wisdom, explaining how the younger you learn to drive, the safer driver you’ll be. “I learned to drive when I was 12 and I’ve never been in an accident.” He also, at least once per month warned, “No matter how good you drive, someday, somewhere, a drunk’s going to come out of nowhere and plow into you.”
When I was very young my dad would strap my car seat into the front of his Datsun 280Z and we’d go flying around the hills above Malibu, near where I grew up. The same roads, in fact, that we now use for the majority of our comparison tests. I believe these weekend runs are part of the reason why I’ve never developed motion sickness, a trait that comes in handy when my “job” requires me to sit in the passenger seats for repeated hot laps of the Nurburgring. Outside of cars and writing, my great passions include beer — brewing and judging as well as tasting — and tournament poker. I also like collecting cactus, because they’re tough to kill. My amazing wife Amy is an actress here in Los Angeles and we have a wonderful son, Richard.Read More
