2025 Ram 1500 Laramie Yearlong Review Update: Road-Trip Warrior
Why our build may represent the ultimate half-ton pickup specification for long-haul road-tripping comfort and convenience.
Your grizzled veteran reporter here has helmed his share of long-term vehicles—all of which have been subjected to multiple long road trips from Detroit to his Tennesseehomestead. And luckily, when it came time to spec our 2025 Truck of the Year–winning Ram 1500, there were new and noteworthy features in need of reporting on that also promised to enhance its road-trip-worthiness. Our first chance to test them out was an epic 2,345-mile jaunt to deliver a large painting to Tallahassee, Florida, with a return trip detour to Memphis, Tennessee. The second was a 1,616-mile run back to Memphis that afforded time for a few more stops back where Big Red’s photo set was shot—along Kentucky’s Bourbon Trail.
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Active Driving Assist
Ram’s Active Driving Assist system still trails GM’s Super Cruise for total functionality, but on the highways mapped for it, it affords equivalent workload reduction and stress relief. The indicator lighting that brackets the instrument cluster like parentheses—dim white when off, green when active, amber for alert, and red when surrendering control—are nearly as effective as the steering wheel lights GM uses and much easier to perceive via peripheral vision than the display messages Ford BlueCruise uses. Ram’s use of capacitive touch sensing eliminates the periodic steering wheel jiggling some versions of BlueCruise require to confirm hands-on.
These long drives revealed some nuances of the automatic lane change system, like the way the system subtly signals when it’s prepared to execute an automated lane change by showing a dashed lane divider on that side of the truck icon in the dash—which often doesn’t occur until several beats after the blind-spot indicators go out. No need to manually steer, unsetting the system for a time. Learning this has eliminated a major point of irritation. And the lane changes are smoother than many, expending 10 turn-signal clicks’ worth of time to complete, with no perceptible yaw on either end.
The driver-monitoring system seems overly aggressive, making us long for the BMW Neue Klasse system’s ability to assess what the driver may be looking at when not looking straight ahead. Time spent looking at the mirrors shouldn’t count on the glance-away shot clock. The current system punishes protracted distractions with a time out, refusing to re-engage hands-free mode. My workaround is to switch to standard cruise mode during tasks like scanning and selecting from my podcast list in CarPlay, re-engaging Active Driving Assist once it’s going.
The system impressed me by correctly assessing extreme drowsiness and disabling itself when my eyelids had grown heavy and a driver swap was genuinely advisable. It also demonstrated an impressive ability to “see through” heavy rain by keeping the wipers on high longer than I would, to clear its second set of “eyes.”
Note, only use cruise control in rain on well-crowned or rain-grooved roads with no standing water that could risk hydroplaning, as was the case in a biblical rainstorm south of Atlanta. Big Red, loaded to just beyond three tons, handled confidently, its still-new tires parting the truck-rut seas like so many Moses.
