The late ’90s and early ’00s street truck fad was great; I miss it. There are still high-performance pickups, of course, though they’re Baja blasters instead of pavement pounders. Cheesy alliteration aside, there are plenty of folks out there who want to see more muscle trucks on the road—and apparently, some of them work at Ram.
That’s what the company’s new G/T Package will have you thinking, what with its factory cold air intake and sport exhaust. It also ditches that much-maligned dial transmission shifter for a more traditional console-mounted lever with paddles behind the steering wheel. If you can’t have a manual, you might as well have those.
Now, the G/T Package can only be equipped on crew-cab Laramie and Rebel trucks with the 5.7-liter Hemi V8 eTorque powertrain. That’s a fairly potent combo with 395 horsepower and 410 pound-feet of torque, and that output gets sent through an eight-speed shiftable automatic. You can’t help but wonder what it’s like to tune that mild-hybrid…
Real truck aficionados will acknowledge the G/T Package’s street cred once they spot those unique graphics on the bedsides. Should they peek inside, they’ll also notice the bucket seats that are presumably better at holding you in while you cane your 6,000-pound truck around corners. That sounds pretty fun, really, and you can even view metrics like zero to 60 times and g-force on the vertical infotainment display. It’s just like a Hellcat, then. Sorta.
Finally, a cold-end exhaust system projects only the nicest sounds out the dual pipes that should definitely be re-routed to exit just in front of the rear passenger wheel. It seemed to work for people in the past, and I wouldn’t knock you for trying it.
Pricing for the Ram 1500 Laramie G/T Package starts at $57,175 including destination, while the Rebel variant is a bit cheaper at $57,070. It only goes up from there once you add other options like available four-wheel drive, so don’t expect to buy one of these for less than you could build a V8 Dakota from yesteryear. Then again, that Dakota probably doesn’t have leather seats…or a 48-volt hybrid system…
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