New 2025 Ram 1500 with hurricane engine.

[dieselscout80]

2019 Classic Bighorn, no brake controller. Based on YouTube, there is a pigtail hidden under the dase set up for one though. Heaviest thing I town regularly is just the little Ck2610, and heaviest I have towed is a 5000# durango on a 1800# trailer. Have had a couple other cars, and pallets on it, but nothing over 6800# total.

It is available to add and can be purchased at ram dealers or at online molar parts stores.

One physically installed a software application has to be used to enable it. You can purchase it (e.g., AlphaOBD or JScan) or the dealer can enable it.

 

[WinterDeere]

... heaviest I have towed is a 5000# durango on a 1800# trailer. Have had a couple other cars, and pallets on it, but nothing over 6800# total.

Surge brakes on that trailer? In most states, any trailer grossing over 3000 or 3500# requires brakes.

I did the surge brake thing awhile, back when I wasn't towing anything over 3000 lb. frequently enough to make installing a brake controller worth the effort. They work, although adjusting them to the load is not always possible, and backing uphill can be impossible if you don't have a pin or collar setup that allows them to be disabled.

 

[wmfamily]

Really tho, other than the pulleys and belts on front giving it away you'd be hard pressed to tell it's actually an engine, ridiculous, I wouldn't want to have to work on it for anything other than an oil change. Always blows my mind when you look at an old engine, take an old 225 slant 6, and compare it to that engineering nightmare:

View attachment 1891732

My '85 Dodge (before Ram) had a slant 6 and my dad swore by them. He had an older Dodge with one. Mine was a great truck and it towed my little VW bug across the Appalachians just fine. The only reason I got rid of it was the family needed something to haul more than three people.

 

[Blue Mule]

Over on the Ford forums the guys talk about an aftermarket software program for Fords called Forscan that they download onto a laptop. They can use that to change all kinds of different parameters on their trucks. I wonder if there is something similar for Ram trucks?

It's awesome.

But, Ram trucks can use AlfaOBD and essentially do the same things. A lot of what dealerships can do is possible at home now, and it's great.

For the record, there are a LOT of reports coming in that the 3.0TT engine in the new Ram isn't reliable and even things like water pumps are 12 hour labor jobs. Typical euro design. They couldn't design a paper bag correctly. I would find a leftover 5.7L V8 Ram if I had to buy new right now.

 

[WinterDeere]

For the record, there are a LOT of reports coming in that the 3.0TT engine in the new Ram isn't reliable and even things like water pumps are 12 hour labor jobs. Typical euro design. They couldn't design a paper bag correctly.

I've spent my career floating back and forth between R&D and design engineering, in fact my last corporate job was as head of R&D, but with my own technical role being mostly design in the last 7 years I was there. I've spent the last 30 years toggling back and forth between Euro and USA companies, and since 2018 had been working in a department equally split between US and French engineers. In the 1990's, I was one of only two Americans in an all-German engineering effort, and so on...

It's a problem categorizing an entire nation of workers under one personality, let alone an entire continent, but I will agree there are higher probabilities of one proclivity vs. another, as you deal with people of different upbringing and education systems. What I've learned from working with so many Euro's over the years is that they more often tend to want to favor performance innovations over proven reliability. I say "proven" reliability, because they will calculate and simulate to death, why the new thing should be more reliable, rather than our more frequent tendency to fall back on what we already know to be reliable. Of course, the devil is in the details, and so little errors or oversights in such calculations and simulations often lead to surprising new ways to break things.

I really enjoy the sometimes-conflicting perspective, even if it sometimes leads to disagreements and arguments over how a design problem should be solved. I do think more industrial innovation per capita or per dollar comes from those ambitious Euro's who like to always push the boundaries, than those who want to continue on the path of what they already know to work, but of course this almost always comes with some growing pains and cost. As with all things, bliss is found in the middle ground, between extremes.

 

[paulsharvey]

I've spent my career floating back and forth between R&D and design engineering, in fact my last corporate job was as head of R&D, but with my own technical role being mostly design in the last 7 years I was there. I've spent the last 30 years toggling back and forth between Euro and USA companies, and since 2018 had been working in a department equally split between US and French engineers. In the 1990's, I was one of only two Americans in an all-German engineering effort, and so on...

It's a problem categorizing an entire nation of workers under one personality, let alone an entire continent, but I will agree there are higher probabilities of one proclivity vs. another, as you deal with people of different upbringing and education systems. What I've learned from working with so many Euro's over the years is that they more often tend to want to favor performance innovations over proven reliability. I say "proven" reliability, because they will calculate and simulate to death, why the new thing should be more reliable, rather than our more frequent tendency to fall back on what we already know to be reliable. Of course, the devil is in the details, and so little errors or oversights in such calculations and simulations often lead to surprising new ways to break things.

I really enjoy the sometimes-conflicting perspective, even if it sometimes leads to disagreements and arguments over how a design problem should be solved. I do think more industrial innovation per capita or per dollar comes from those ambitious Euro's who like to always push the boundaries, than those who want to continue on the path of what they already know to work, but of course this almost always comes with some growing pains and cost. As with all things, bliss is found in the middle ground, between extremes.

I've always heard that in Japanese vs German vehicles, there are totally different cultural assumptions.
In Germany, they make the assumption that if the "book" say to service/replace Part A at 50,000 miles, people will; because it says to, and everyone follows the rules.
In Japan, the assumption is that people will not do the required services, and that it needs to be designed to work even if the service isn't done.

I think in the US, the assumption is, it will fail and break regardless, so keep it cheap, and the customer really only needs it to last to the end of warranty, but it does have to "look cool".

 

[ponytug]

I've always heard that in Japanese vs German vehicles, there are totally different cultural assumptions.
In Germany, they make the assumption that if the "book" say to service/replace Part A at 50,000 miles, people will; because it says to, and everyone follows the rules.
In Japan, the assumption is that people will not do the required services, and that it needs to be designed to work even if the service isn't done.

I think in the US, the assumption is, it will fail and break regardless, so keep it cheap, and the customer really only needs it to last to the end of warranty, but it does have to "look cool".

That's not true of Japanese service in the industries that I am familiar with. For instance, here on the west coast we get a steady stream of used car and truck engines from Japan with 50-80k miles on them that were "serviced" out to give the owners a new engine. The engines as a rule are perfectly fine. Talk about preventative maintenance. My experience that the Japanese approach to service resembles other cultures that have a perfectionist adherence to what the manual says.

I'm not saying that all Japanese do X, and there are exceptions to the rule.

All the best,

Peter

 

[paulsharvey]

Pony, I mean that only on the design philosophy, not the actual maintenance by Japanese owners. Their engineers tend to design for worse than normal. With that, often they aren't "ahead of the times", and let others lead the way for a year or two, and then they refine the existing new system.

Could be chicken and egg thing? but with the number of Japanese vehicles in 2nd world locations (and 3rd), either A they design it for that, or B, they end up selling so well in 2nd world because of the good design?

Even still, plenty of crap from Japan, US, PRC, Germany, ect.

 

[Hay Dude]

It's awesome.

But, Ram trucks can use AlfaOBD and essentially do the same things. A lot of what dealerships can do is possible at home now, and it's great.

For the record, there are a LOT of reports coming in that the 3.0TT engine in the new Ram isn't reliable and even things like water pumps are 12 hour labor jobs. Typical euro design. They couldn't design a paper bag correctly. I would find a leftover 5.7L V8 Ram if I had to buy new right now.

Would agree that it's usually best to wait a bit and let others be the guinea pigs when it comes to a new engine.

 

[dodge man]

I always remember a friends dad who had a slant six in an old Dodge pickup. During the summer he pulled in and it was overheating. He complained it had been doing it for a while. I opened the hood and he had put cardboard completely blocking off the radiator the previous winter. It took me about 10 seconds to fix that problem. Not really relevant to this thread but a slant six story on how you can’t kill them.