Ram 1500 BEV Will Follow You Autonomously (First Look)
Auto Tech
Speaker 1: Ram just threw his hat into the battle. Four electric truck supremacy and that hat landed with quite the impact.
Speaker 1: Delanes pickup truck brand just debuted the vehicle behind me. The Ram 1500 Revolution, b e v or battery electric vehicle. It's a fully electric truck, the first vehicle that'll be built on STIs, Stella framed body on frame architecture for next generation electric trucks. It's got a bunch of [00:00:30] batteries built into the frame of the vehicle. They don't tell us how much capacity or how much range, but we do know that this thing will charge quickly. With an 800 volt architecture, it's able to accept up 350 kilowatts of energy, allowing it to add around a hundred miles in just like 18 minutes of charging. Now the package includes space for two electric motors, one on the front axle, and one at the rear. Now, they won't tell us power, but they did tell us that there's room left in there for even bigger motors. So imagine a high performance Baja version of this truck, electric T-Rex, anybody.
Speaker 1: Now, some [00:01:00] of the most interesting technology in this vehicle is actually on the inside where it has an extremely flexible cabin. The doors are hinged in a way that they open up revealing a massive opening with no B pillar. And inside you can see that all the seats and the center console are located on rails, which means that they can be slid around and reconfigured. Flip backwards. This thing can turn into an office on wheels. At the touch of a button in the center stack, you've got two screens, both 14 inches in their stack vertically. The bottom screen can move or hide behind the first one or even be removed and used as [00:01:30] a remote screen somewhere else in the vehicle. Now it's built with autonomy in mind, so the steering wheel while there can fold away for level three self-driving. Now, self-driving isn't something that's coming to Rammy anytime in the near future, but that's Foldaway steering wheel could be nice when you need to transfer the front row into an office while you're parked.
Speaker 1: Now, one of the coolest autonomous features that this deposits is a thing called shadow mode. In shadow mode, you could get out of the truck, becken it, and it'll actually follow you at low speed while you walk on foot. That could be interesting for kinds of work [00:02:00] that you need where you're getting in and out of your truck all day and you just want to keep it with you. Maybe you're expecting a fence on a farm and you don't want to just keep walking back to your truck. Now, like one of its upcoming competitors, Chevrolet's Electric Silverado, there is a powered mid gate here that can be folded down to extend storage from the bed into the cabin or vice versa. But this goes a step further with foldable third row jump seats on that mid gate. A first in the industry wanna go even further?
Speaker 1: There's actually even a pass through into the front here that allows you to carry up to 18 foot [00:02:30] long beams all the way from the back of the tailgate to the front of the vehicle, passing straight through the cabin. How's that for blending your storage spaces? Now, Ram says that the actual production version of the 1500 B V is coming sometime in 2024, and we can expect to learn more about what that vehicle will look like, what those specs will be in the coming months. Be sure to stay tuned to the rest of our coverage of the electric vehicles at CES 2023. You can find that all over@cars.cnet.com.
