Ram fans might have been disappointed upon learning the truck maker will not be shoving the 6.4-liter Hemi V8 into its 1500 light-duty pickup. Nor will the truck maker make a single-cab street truck. But there’s a market for a sport truck and the man in charge of Ram knows it.
On Wednesday, during an exclusive one-on-one interview Ram CEO Tim Kuniskis said the recently announced supercharged street truck collaboration between Fox Factory and Mopar is “a test of what the market acceptance is going to be.” The man in charge of the truck maker continued, “I’ll be honest with you, the reception, I figured it would be good, and I’ll tell you why I figured it would be good, but it was actually even a little bit better than what I thought.”
So you’re saying there’s a chance of a Hellcat-powered street truck? The CEO side stepped the question and never said yes or no as to whether Ram might strip the off-road suspension out of the resurrected TRX, lower it, and make a Hellcat-powered street truck. But, the CEO explained in detail to The Drive the logic and evidence behind this, at the current moment in time, untapped market segment.
Kuniskis said, “if you look at today, shockingly, I will say admittedly, the North American Truck of the Year was the Maverick Lobo. So it tells you there’s some interest in that space, not only from consumers, but also from journalists, you know, for that to be the North American Truck of the Year.”
“Is there something in that space? I definitely believe there’s something in that space, and not because of Lobo or not because of the Fox Factory [collaboration]. But, because of what people actually buy, and this is where it gets interesting. If you look at the muscle car space, if you look at Camaros, Mustangs, Chargers, previously Challengers, if you look at that space, and then you look at the truck space. For every person that buys a muscle car, there’s 10 people that buy a truck, right? So it’s exponentially larger. It’s a bigger net in the industry because of how useful trucks have become,” Kuniskis explained.
The CEO went on to provide market segment insights to support the connection between muscle car buyers and truck owners. “When something gets that much acceptance in the marketplace, it starts to get segmented. If you look at the truck buyer, the truck buyer probably has very little connection to the muscle car buyer, because you’re looking at this huge population of people, and it kind of gets lost in the shuffle. But now, if you look at the muscle car buyer, the muscle car buyer’s, number one, not even close, number one, most likely garage mate to their muscle car, is a light-duty pickup truck. So, the muscle car buyer is also a light-duty pickup truck buyer. So there is automatically a really solid connection in there, but it’s not super obvious, because the size of the truck business is so big, it’s a fraction. But it tells you that that buyer is one and another the same, and you see, the decline in, you know, the muscle car space, and some of that, quite frankly, is, you know, when we went away from the L cars [Kuniskis was referencing the outgoing Chrysler 300, Dodge Charger and Challenger here], and Camaro went out of production, and only Mustang is there, and now we’re coming back. Some of that is self collected. But, nevertheless, even when it was at its peak, it still ten to one.”
Add it all together and Kuniskis is dead set there’s a space for a street-oriented sport truck in Ram’s lineup. “When I know that that buyer is the same, is there a buyer for that? Is there a space for that? Well, the sport truck and Fox Factory [collaboration], and what we’re seeing going on in the industry right now, combined with that data of that buyer being the same, says there’s definitely a space set,” Kuniskis said.
The Father of the Hellcats stopped completely short of confirming any production-bound sport truck. “Am I telling you, we’re gonna build a sport truck? No, I’m not telling you we’re going to build a sport truck. I’m telling you, there’s clearly a market for them,” Kuniskis said.
Kuniskis repeated that he would not confirm whether the truck maker is making a sport truck, but quickly followed with, “the data would suggest that there’s a consumer appetite for that and a desire for that in that space.”
Logic dictates if Ram brings a street truck to market it would wear an SRT badge after the performance division was brought back from the dead by none other than Kuniskis.
History is important and Kuniskis noted the fact early in the conversation that, “we have a long history of sport trucks. We had the SRT-10 [a Viper-powered pickup truck with a manual transmission and rear-wheel drive], we had the Rumble Bee, you know, we have a history in that space.”
Sure do. And with a Ford F-150 Lobo entering the segment masquerading as a street truck the segment is ripe for Ram to come in with a Hellcat-powered street truck and show competitors how a proper street truck is setup. The truck exists today, it simply has off-road suspension and big tires. The market data shows Kuniskis it might be worth swapping out the suspension and off-road dinosaur’s attitude to tap another segment.
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