![]() The downside is that the 8-foot pickup bed is nearly dead these days, and the short box is becoming ever more common. Calling it "roomy" is selling it short as I've marveled before, it offers more rear legroom than nearly anything else on the market, including chauffeur-ready luxury sedans. Plus, the interior of a loaded Ram 1500 Laramie is a nicer place to be than anything else in the work-ready class, which is great when you're driving around all day looking for supplies like some scavenger in the post-apocalyptic wastes (why is it so hard to find pressure-treated lumber near me these days?). ![]() And yeah, I get that you can fit a lot of stuff in the back of a commercial van, but it's not the same. You might only tow your 5-ton boat from storage to the marina and back once per season, but a lot of us suburbanites have a never-ending list of small- to medium-size home improvement projects to tackle, and that's where the ability to toss stuff in an easily accessible, hose-outable bed is tough to beat. This is arguably how most of these trucks get used. And because coronavirus is apparently having an unpredictable effect on big box hardware store supply chains and staffing, I had to chase down said supplies-corrugated sheetmetal, pressure-treated lumber, nuts and bolts, plus a range of large-ish material for a half-dozen other home improvement projects-across seemingly all of southeastern Michigan. RamĪnyway, I wasn't going to be using this 3.92 rear axle ratio-equipped truck to tow anything like its 11,220-pound max trailer weight rating, but I did need to pick up a lot of oddly shaped supplies to make raised planter boxes. ![]() But what about other facets of capability, like hauling? That’s what I aimed to test out this time around. We usually think of pickup capability in terms of towing, because that’s where the biggest numbers are found. (This newfound national horticultural impulse is reminiscent of the so-called Victory Gardens of WWII in the same way that we're quick to compare the medical supply-manufacturing efforts of automakers to Detroit's wartime Arsenal of Democracy effort, I think we're all looking for some way to create purpose and meaning in the midst of a crisis in which we're told to stay at home and do nothing. When I wrangled this 20 Laramie Crew Cab 4x4 for a week, I had a different sort of mission in mind: Like seemingly every American with a tenth of an acre of weedy lawn to spare and a lot of extra time on their hands these days, I've decided to plant a garden. For every Ram 3500 dually adventure that involves lugging an old van cross-country, there are five stories by someone like me, who uses a newer, shinier and even more capable version of that truck to cart home a relatively dinky amount of cargo. There's a common thread running through most pickup reviews-not just ours, I'll note-and it's that we tend to barely scratch the surface of what these trucks are capable of doing.
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