The Ram 1500 Classic Was a Strange Experiment — But It Worked
Story by Zac Palmer5 min read
When the pickup truck we now know as the Ram 1500 Classic first entered production, George W. Bush was still president of the United States. Its sales life stretched across touched three decades before Ram finally announced its discontinuation back in August of this year, as the new Hurricane-powered 2025 Ram 1500 hit the market. Simply put, it was the truck that simply wouldn’t die.
A 16-year lifetime is shockingly long for any vehicle, but the Classic's story is a strange one by any sort of modern new-car standard. It officially shifted from oddball dinosaur to automotive anomaly back in 2019, when Ram decided to keep producing it (in Warren, Michigan) simultaneously with the totally new Ram 1500 (built in Sterling Heights, MI) at a plant literally less than 10 miles down the road from the new truck’s assembly line. And this wasn’t just a single model year overlap; Ram produced the previous generation 1500 throughout the entire lifespan of the next-gen pickup. Imagine if you could still buy the previous-generation C7 Chevrolet Corvette brand-new off the dealer lot today, warranty and all. That would be weird, right?
Effectively, that’s what Ram’s been up to. Yes, there was a refresh in the mid-2010s, but the Ram 1500 Classic is essentially a pre-Obama truck still being sold in 2024. The man who led development for the original DS-generation Ram 1500 (later renamed Classic) was Carl Lally, and he’s still with Ram today. Here in late 2024, Lally goes by the fancier title of Vice President Global Ram Sales, but there’s no person more qualified to talk Ram Classic than him.
“The time that we rolled that thing out it was like three or four presidents ago,” Lally recalls. “It’s one of those trivia questions, like, who was president when that truck was introduced?”
Fast forward to the introduction of the next-generation Ram 1500 for the 2019 model year, which the moment when the 1500 went from simply a great-riding pickup to the king of all luxury trucks. It was a sea change that caused other truck manufacturers to step up their refinement efforts to match the Ram on the playing field. That transition upwards had another effect, though; prices jumped, and Ram dropped the entry-level Tradesman trim.
“When we launched the new Ram 1500, the DT generation, as we call it back in 2018 for the 2019 model year, it made all the sense in the world to keep that DS generation of the truck around,” Lally explained. “Felt that it really made a lot of sense to let us continue to go after the value-oriented buyer. At that lower end, the vocational oriented buyer, looking for a Tradesman type of work truck.”
Ram plainly told us that it doesn’t break out sales between the Classic and other Rams, but the Classic’s presence on the market for so many years tells the story. Dealers ordered the Classic in droves to serve more budget-oriented new truck buyers; fleets saw it as a great way to get brand-new trucks on a proven platform. If you wanted a two-door regular cab Ram half-ton, it was the only way to get one.
The Classic was a low-investment pickup for Ram, allowing prices to stay low and, presumably, profits to roll in. But Ram didn't leave it to wither away, either. The company saw fit to add an off-road Warlock trim for 2021, an the 8.4-inch UConnect 4 infotainment system arrived as an option that year, too. Then just one year later, UConnect 5 joined the party, bringing wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. (We bet engineers didn’t have that on the product roadmap when this truck was conceived.)
“So there were minor changes,” Lally told Road & Track. “But it was, I would say, generally, you know, not that heavy investment because whenever we wanted to showcase new technology, the new truck lends itself to that.”
Beyond product updates, one of the toughest parts about selling two trucks that look similar and have the same basic name was simple customer education.
“We had to explain to our dealers and then obviously, explain to the customers, that we've got two trucks called the Ram 1500 of the same model year, but they're not the same truck,” Lally says. “So there's some natural opportunity for confusion there. If you go back to 2018-2019, I think we really had a bit of a learning curve to kind of figure that out over time.”
Truck enthusiasts figured things out quickly enough, and the multi-pronged pickup approach helped Ram put together some epic years of truck sales; it managed to beat the Chevrolet Silverado from 2019–2022, only giving up its second-place throne in 2023.
When asked if Ram would be open to employing the “Classic” strategy into the future, though, Lally squashed the idea.
“So I would take the scenario that we're now looking at, with just the one truck that has this compelling offering at the lower end,” Lally starts. “I think that's the ideal way to do it. Classic was the right answer at that time, but I would stick with where we are today I think, as far as how we move forward.”
The new DT-generation Ram 1500 Tradesman, which is replacing the Classic at the lower end of the lineup.© Stellantis
The compelling offer at the lower end Lally is talking about is the 2025 model year Tradesman (pictured above) that starts at $42,270. For comparison’s sake, that’s only $1,570 more than the totally stripper-spec 2024 Ram 1500 Classic Tradesman. Of course, the new one has a laundry list of additional features and standard equipment compared to the old version, not to mention the option of the potent Hurricane twin-turbo inline-six instead of the 3.6-liter Pentastar V-6.
With the price gap being as small as it is and the equipment gap being as wide as it is, Lally said that the time was right to finally say goodbye to the Classic. It’s an argument that’s tough to disagree with; the last real leg Ram’s Classic has to stand on is the 5.7-liter Hemi V-8, which is still available in the Classic but not in the refreshed 2025 pickup. But it’s officially the end of the line now — and with that we bid adieu to what was easily one of the strangest automotive sales experiments of the 21st century.
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