Each year at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Monday is photo night. In 2005, while snapping the then-new Honda Ridgeline, we overheard a conversation we assumed was among engineers or marketing guys from one of the Big Three manufacturers.
It'll Never Sell
"A front-drive pickup will never fly. What was Honda thinking?"
Since Honda couldn't directly compete in the full-size-truck marketplace, it needed to think outside the box, offering a near-full-size vehicle for nontraditional truck buyers, quite possibly those who would be buying a pickup for the first time. Now, after a sluggish launch, Honda will come close to meeting its first full-year sales target of 50,000 vehicles, and in the aftermath of its double win of North American Truck of the Year and Motor Trend's Truck of the Year, it looks like Ridgeline sales are gaining momentum in the marketplace.
A Different Kind of Truck
If you take the basic packaging concepts of the Ridgeline, add fold-flat seats and a healthy dose of in-your-face attitude on the style side, you'd get the Dodge Rampage, which made its debut to wide critical acclaim at the 2006 Chicago auto show.
The Rampage features a host of people- and cargo-carrying innovations made possible with unitized body construction, front drive, and unique independent rear-wheel suspension. It looks like the Dodge design team adapted virtually every good idea from the Honda Ridgeline (which also features unitized construction) and a few from the Chevy Avalanche (a traditional body-on-frame truck) and mixed in a few of their own homegrown ideas. These include features like Stow 'n Go seating and a rotating center stack, along with a 5.7-liter Hemi driving the front wheels (there are provisions for a later installation of a pair of 60-kilowatt electric motors to give it hybrid all-wheel-drive capabilities). What you have is a totally unique car/truck/SUV crossover that doesn't look like it was beat with an ugly stick.
It uses a unique drivetrain, a Multi Displacement System-equipped 5.7-liter Hemi driving just the front wheels. This configuration isn't seen in any other Chrysler vehicle. The initial plans called for the Rampage to have a hybrid drivetrain. By the time the rear motors were eliminated, it was probably too late to go with a conventional four- or all-wheel-drive setup, because the primary innovation in the Rampage is its five-passenger Stow 'n Go seating, the first in a pickup truck.
"It's the truck for the nontraditional buyer," explains Scott Krugger, principal exterior designer. "This is a truck for the person who wants the functional aspects of a truck yet doesn't want a traditional vehicle. The Rampage has the capability of a pickup without sacrificing occupant space."
Why would this make a difference? A front-to-rear drivetrain would've eliminated the rear center seat from Stow 'n Go, thus destroying the versatility provided by the fold-flat seats--once they started building the concept, that was no longer an option.