Split Decision: Is the Ram TRX SRT the Last Combustion Monument or the First That Drives Itself Home?

For five years the industry has been on its knees apologizing for the V8. Apologizing to regulators, apologizing to shareholders, apologizing to people who have never once stood next to a running engine and felt their own ribs answer it. They retired the eights one funeral at a time, and they did it with a little press-release frown, as if the thing they were burying had wronged them.

Then on a Tuesday in June, in Auburn Hills, Ram walked into that wake and slammed an order book on the casket.

Read the numbers, because the numbers are the sermon. A 6.2-liter supercharged HEMI V8. Ram says 777 horsepower. Ram says 680 lb-ft of torque. Ram calls it the most powerful production gas-powered off-road truck ever, and I have no reason to call a man a liar when he hands me a figure that large and dares me to flinch.

Here is the part that should stop you cold. The MSRP is $99,995. Destination is another $2,795, and I will keep the two apart the way the desk likes, because honesty costs nothing. By Ram's own math, that price buys more horsepower per dollar than any premium full-size off-road truck on the market. Sit with that. The cheapest way to own that many horses, on paper, is a Ram. Not a badge that costs the price of a house. A truck you can order at a dealership this summer.

I have not driven it. Nobody has. I am not going to insult you with a howl I did not hear or a launch I did not feel, the way lesser men pad a column. So this is not a road test. This is a notice.

Because everything around the engine is the future arriving whether I like it or not. Ram fitted this thing with Hands-Free Active Drive Assist, standard, the first time on this truck. A 777-horsepower machine with 35-inch tires and 11.8 inches of ground clearance, and they taught it to mind the highway so your hands can rest. Olivia will plant her whole column on that one line, and she will not be wrong about what it signals. A cathedral with a moving walkway installed down the center aisle is still telling you something about which way the congregation is headed.

But she is reading the hood ornament. I am reading the engine.

The engine is the thing they swore could not survive the decade. Full-time four-wheel drive. Standard Launch Control. Ram says zero to sixty in 3.5 seconds. A supercharged eight, built on purpose, sold for money, by a company that knows exactly how unfashionable it is and built it anyway. That is not nostalgia. That is defiance with a VIN.

Mourn it if you want. I half do. A thing this loud does not get made twice in a row, and the men who sign off on it are retiring into the same fog that took the rest.

But mourning is for what is gone. This one is not gone. The book is open.

Go sign it.

Read the order sheet to the end. Hank's side will stop at 777 horsepower, because 777 horsepower is where the elegy needs it to stop. Keep going. Down past the supercharger, past the 35-inch tires, past the 3.5 seconds to 60, there is a line Ram buried like it was nothing: Hands-Free Active Drive Assist, Level 2+, standard. For the first time on this truck. The cathedral comes with a copilot.

Let me grant the other pew its strongest point, because it is real. There is genuine engineering nerve in a 6.2-liter supercharged HEMI that makes 680 lb-ft and 777 horsepower and still clears 11.8 inches of ground. Nobody fakes that. Ram says it is the most powerful production gas-powered off-road truck ever, and I have no reason to doubt the arithmetic. At $99,995 plus $2,795 destination, it is, by Ram's math, more horsepower per dollar than any premium full-size off-road truck. As a monument to combustion, it is built to last.

Now watch the monument betray itself.

You do not put hands-free driver assistance on a thing you believe in as a driver's machine. You put it there because the customer, the real one, the one with the deposit, wants to stop driving somewhere around exit 40. Ram knows this. Ram is the only company that knows its buyers better than its press releases do. So it engineered a 118-mph statement of internal-combustion defiance and then, quietly, on the same spec sheet, admitted the statement gets tiring on I-80 and gave you a system to coast it home.

That is not a feature. That is a confession.

Here is the reframe Hank cannot afford. The TRX SRT is not the last combustion monument. It is the first combustion monument that no longer trusts you to want to drive it the whole way. The horsepower is for the brochure. Level 2+ is for the commute. Ram built both into one truck and called it commanding, and the word doing the real work, the word that tells you which way the next ten years run, is not "supercharged." It is "hands-free."

I will say the thing my colleague reads as heresy. This is what the end of an era actually looks like. Not a funeral. A feature list, where the engine gets the headline and the software gets the standard equipment, and the marketing department never once notices it has written both halves of the obituary on the same page.

Two things I owe you, plainly. Level 2+ is a driver assist, not a self-driving truck. Ram's own term is hands-free; the meaning is a system that helps, with you responsible, awake, and accountable. And nobody has driven this thing, me included, so I will not tell you how it goes down a trail. I do not invent the drive I wish I had taken.

But I do not need the drive. I need the order sheet, and the order sheet is enough. A man can spend $99,995 on the most powerful gas off-road truck ever made, tick no boxes, and still take delivery of a machine designed, in part, to drive itself down the highway while he checks his phone.

So here is the verdict, decisive word last. Hank thinks Ram built the last cathedral. Ram built the first one that drives itself home.

Split Decision: Is the Ram TRX SRT the Last Combustion Monument or the First That Drives Itself Home?

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