General Motors, Chrysler and Ford all killed off their mid-size pickups as the economy crashed and fuel prices soared. However, a few years later, the Chevy Colorado and GMC Canyon returned and roared to success. Now, both Ford and Fiat-Chrysler Automobiles want to cash in on the market.
And we’ll see a new Chevy Colorado rival emerge from not only Jeep, but Ram, too. Automotive News (subscription required) reported Monday that a new mid-size Ram pickup truck will be built at the Toledo, Ohio, manufacturing plant. The Toledo plant currently builds the new 2018 Wrangler off-road SUV in the North portion of the plant. The South portion has been tooling up for Jeep Scrambler production—the brand’s first pickup since the CJ-8 Scrambler of the 1980s.
The unnamed Ram pickup will be built alongside the Scrambler, according to supplier sources, and will be body-on-frame like the Scrambler.
The last time FCA sold a mid-size pickup was in the Dodge Dakota, which exited production in 2011 after a 25-year production run. Ram was also spun off into its own division since the last time the automaker built a mid-size truck.
Not much else is known about the Ram pickup, or its platform-sharing cousin, the Jeep Scrambler. The Scrambler is expected to debut in 2019 as a 2020 model, while the future Ram pickup launches in 2020 as a 2021 model. The Ram will also help fill out unused capacity at the South end of the Toledo manufacturing site.
When the 2021 Ram mid-size truck does debut, the next-generation Chevy Colorado and GMC Canyon shouldn’t be too far behind it. The last rumors surrounding the two GM pickups peg a 2022 launch date for the next-generation trucks. That was in 2017, and things certainly could have changed since then, but both Chevy and GMC certainly won’t rest on their laurels.
Comments
Hopefully, it will revive the Dakota name and prayerfully the keep with their psychotic Dodge trend of being overtly extreme. With the Dakota, I would hope for an R/T variant, an SRT-392 variant, a Rebel-style off road variant, an SXT convertible, a top of the line luxury Limited, and a work truck variant. In a world of mostly boring American small trucks, The Dodge would be the one to stand out in a good way.
Just throwing it out there that RAM is its own brand now.