After Road-Tripping Ram’s Passenger Screen, It Feels Like a Missed Opportunity
We tried every plausible way a front-seat co-pilot might use our Ram 1500’s extra screen, and the results raise bigger questions about tech, etiquette, and usability on long drives.
What’s your social contract for front-seat occupants on a road trip? Should the driver and co-pilot engage in shared conversation, entertainment, or route decision making? Or as a driver, do you allow your co-pilot to isolate in personal-device engrossment? Call me old school, but the latter seems a flagrant flouting of the Golden Rule. I allow sleeping, to ensure they’re fresh enough to relieve me on longer legs, but plugging in to another world seems antisocial. Still, the editorial question remains: How useful is our yearlong review 2025 Ram 1500’s passenger infotainment screen?
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Plan to bring a second phone to serve as a hot-spot for smart-stick video streaming.
HDMI Streaming Sticks
If this is your goal, don’t forget to bring along a device that supports streaming—and maybe a hot spot. We pay for a 4G modem connection in the Ram, yet this screen has no provision for surfing the web or searching and playing YouTube or other online content over that built-in connection. Stellantis screens require the Amazon Fire TV system to stream content, as no browser or player is built in. A Cadillac Escalade we recently sampled allowed both direct streaming and browsing on its passenger screen.
After plugging our Roku Stick into the HDMI port in the front console, it refused to connect to the built-in 4G Wi-Fi modem we pay for. Roku should work fine on 4G LTE, but vehicle hot spots often use restrictive network-address translation, firewalls, and power-saving behaviors that streaming sticks don’t tolerate well, even when bandwidth is sufficient. It tethered to my phone fine, but a phone connected wirelessly to CarPlay cannot serve as a hot spot, so the passenger will need to use a separate phone for this purpose. (If you’re keeping count, that’s a third cellular subscription on board, presuming the driver is running CarPlay on a separate phone and utilizing Uconnect services via the built-in modem.)
Alas, content played via HDMI sticks or HDMI-HDMI cables (e.g., DVD players, laptops) cannot be output to the vehicle speakers. (Rear screens playing Amazon Fire TV content offer a “listen in” option.) This was another disappointment, as a driver who once enjoyed listening to Walk the Line as rear occupants watched on the rear screens in a Nissan Quest.
Eureka! My cursor goes between screens! Sadly, the Ram screen is too small to read at native resolution.
Maybe Extend Your Laptop Screen?
When editing the MotorTrend content you read, I prefer to use two or three screens, calling up reference materials on the auxiliary displays. And on long trips, I often work from the passenger seat while my co-pilot spoils me. Happily, my trusty Acer Cable supports this. Sadly, the resolution is way too small to be useful.
Now I can read the Ram screen, but not enough info fits on either screen to be useful.
ChatGPT offered several suggestions, like changing the display scaling or resolution. While it claimed I should be able to tailor these parameters individually for the different screens, any change I made to Display 2 was also applied to the main screen. Upshot: If the little screen was readable, the big one’s fonts were ridiculously huge. ChatGPT had other suggestions like overriding DPI scaling behavior and digging around in the BIOS to change things I didn’t feel qualified to attempt.
Listening to Derek Bieri’s colloquialisms is half the fun, but the driver can’t share in the auditory entertainment.
