Rental Car Ruckus 2: Electric Boogaloo

[Jake]

Needed a pickup to help move some furniture from my place to a friend's place in DC. She moved from Illinois to start grad school, our moms are best friends, etc etc so I said I'd help out. Everyone I know with a pickup needed it this weekend, so I called up a long-time friend who's a manager at Enterprise in Vienna. Turns out, they rent crew-cab pickups and the "friend rate" is pretty sweet.

$51 got me Clifford The Big Red Truck - a 2014 Ram 1500 with the 5.7L V8 and 8-speed Chrysler slushbox.



It was an SLT, which means nothing to me other than "sort of base model" but it was reasonably equipped. Had the 5" UConnect touchscreen, pumping through 6 speakers of purely average quality:



It was very easy to pair my phone to the Bluetooth, and I hooked up to the USB port to keep it charged while playing music. One confusing bit... on the dash, there's a 12V socket and a USB port. I plugged my phone in to the USB, thinking it would be recognized by the radio. It wasn't. Turns out, there's another USB port in the center armrest that is hooked up to the radio. The dash plug is only for charging. WTF, Chrysler.

The 8-speed has this new rotary-style shift knob:



Kinda neat, definitely saves space. The detents between "gear selections" (aka inputs to the Xbox) are firm so it's easy to know how many clicks you've spun it. You can shift/lock in a gear with two buttons on the steering wheel, but they are really slow to respond - any notion of "I'll downshift it myself because sportstruck" is just not gonna happen.

As far as the drivetrain - plenty of power. I think it's like 395 hp and 409 tq. Whatever it was, it was fine. The truck was quick off the line but I'm not sure how it would fare for any sort of drag race from a roll. It was too hard to tell given how many gears it has. The 8-speed wants to get you into the highest gear as quick as possible unless you keep your foot in it about 30-40% or more. The motor will also deactivate 4 cylinders under light load and tell you with a stupid "Eco" light in the gauge cluster. I made sure the Eco light didn't appear too often.



Joey claims I drive everywhere like I'm sitting on a lit cigarette. Even with that claim (he's not entirely wrong...) and some legitimate slow-speed city driving through DC, the truck claimed to average 18 mpg in my hands. Not all bad for the size.

It's really quite large for a 1/2 ton, though. Too big for my liking - it seems to sit higher than the comparable Ford and GM offerings. But, most times I rent a car and hate it because it's some massive shitpile or has big detractors. This was really not bad at all and I don't have anything bad to say about it - other than the front seat headrests are HUGE and impede rear visibility during lane changes. That's all. Everything else was really good.