Whether you call it a dressed up Tradesmen or a Rebel-lite
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00:00This
00:29might not be the truck that you think it is. This is the Ram 1500 Warlock, and it's back
00:35with a new engine, some serious off-road hardware, and all of that at an incredible value.
00:58Now that we're inside the Warlock, you can tell that this is based on the Ram 1500 trades.
01:04It starts with cloth seats. You've got the dashboard from the old truck. You've got a
01:10smaller touch screen up here. It's not the screen that goes all the way down to the floor.
01:15Got a more basic steering wheel. There aren't as many soft touch surfaces as the other trucks,
01:20and I've got to reach all the way down here and actually slide my seat forward and back,
01:25and I can only adjust the tilt here. I can't raise the seat up, but those are the things
01:31that make the Warlock the Warlock, and it gets better. Truck fans should love this.
01:36You can sit three people across the front bench. Just fold this up. There's seat belts
01:42and everything. It's getting harder and harder to find trucks where you can do this.
01:47The biggest news for the Ram 1500 lineup is the powertrain. You used to be able to get
01:53this exact truck with a V8. That's not the story anymore. Now we have the 3-liter Hurricane
01:59twin-turbocharged in line six. This engine's found in everything from the top of the line
02:05down to the tradesman. So let's see how this puppy sounds.
02:16All right, getting into the throttle, and there's no hiding it. There is no V8 in this truck.
02:23Don't get that engine note, and you're probably going to miss that for just a little bit until
02:30you look at the numbers. So this inline six is putting out 420 horsepower, 469 feet of torque,
02:39and those numbers are up from the outgoing V8. We're also looking at better efficiency numbers,
02:45and the engine's lighter than the V8. So that translates into pretty darn good performance
02:51on the highway. A little bit longer between fuel stops, but we're doing about 25 miles an hour
02:58down a pretty bumpy road. We're not rock crawling. We're not desert racing.
03:03So this truck is right at home. We've got Bilstein shock absorbers in each corner,
03:10and they are smoothing out this road pretty well. We're hitting, I wouldn't say potholes,
03:18but some pretty good bumps here. Oh, this truck could go all day on this road. It's quiet in the
03:24cabin. My head's not getting snapped back and forth. This is comfortable. This is how a truck
03:29should ride on a bumpy road. Now let's steer this off into some bigger bumps here. We're
03:36turning off the gravel road onto some, whoa man, sorry. Okay, we're in some legitimate desert whoops
03:45here, and this is not where the truck is at home. You will very quickly find the limits of the
03:55suspension in the whoops. Like we're going maybe 20, and if I go, oh there we go. If I go two miles an
04:03hour faster than that, you will find the bump stops. So just because you can't bomb over the whoops at
04:0850 miles an hour in this truck, it doesn't make it any less capable, because this truck wasn't built
04:14to go into whoops. If that's what you want to do, we have the RHO for that, and the Warlock is not that.
04:21This truck is really good at exactly what it's supposed to do, and that's being a truck. Not being
04:27a race truck, not being a crazy rock crawler, just being a truck. What are the things that make a
04:34truck a truck? That's four-wheel drive. Warlock has four high, two high, four low, and even has that
04:41electronically locking rear differential that you can select with the push of a button. That's huge.
04:47On some trucks it does that for you, whether you like it or not. This one, selectable. That's big.
04:52What are we missing from the Rebel package? So this doesn't have four-wheel drive auto.
04:57That's totally fine. When's the last time you've used four-wheel drive auto?
05:01You've got four high, life is good. One of the important things we get from the Rebel package
05:07is the tires. The Goodyear tires on the Warlock are really good. So we're out here in the middle
05:15of the California desert, and this is a place where people drive to from all corners of the country.
05:21They'll load up their pickup trucks and their trailers full of toys and come out here to play
05:26in the dirt. So once you're out here, you can be driving on gravel roads, dirt roads, you can be
05:31crawling rocks, you can get up in the mountains and play in the snow and the mud, and you can even
05:37slay some dunes out here. And that's exactly what we've got right ahead of us. Let's see how the
05:43Warlock does in the sand. Okay, so we're cruising through the sand and Warlock lets you go into
05:54ultimate fun mode in the sand, which is two-wheel drive and a locked rear axle. So let's go here,
06:02two-wheel, axle locked, and here we go. No problem getting this thing sideways.
06:17We're doing this in our tow rig here.
06:19There's our sand donut. Oh, this is a blast. Two-wheel drive. Not even close to getting stuck.
06:34This is what I love about the selectable locking differential. This lets you party in the loose
06:40stuff, and it also helps you not get stuck when traction is low. You don't always need
06:47four-wheel drive to have a blast. There we go.
07:03All right, that was fun in the sand. There's still dust back there from the donuts.
07:08I think now we've got to slow this down a little bit and see how the Warlock handles
07:12crawling through the rocks. I can see the rocky trail right over here, and the Warlock has
07:21a lot of carryover features from the Rebel that make it super duper ready to crawl over some
07:29pretty gnarly rocks. Starting with the Goodyear tires, those are the Wrangler DuraTrax. That's a
07:36really aggressive tread pattern, and that can bite into the rocks and the snow and the dirt
07:40and the mud, but they're also really grippy in the rocks. Some of the better tires you can get
07:46on a stock truck. We've got four high and four low, and remember, this truck has that selectable
07:53locking rear differential, so you can push yourself up rocky trails with that locked rear
07:59axle. And we're not working with the most ground clearance out here. We only have 33-inch tall
08:05tires, so this truck is very capable on the trails, but we still have to be careful when we're
08:12picking our way through the rocks. And when we're in the rocks, we've also got skid plates underneath.
08:16We've got skids under the engine transfer case and a real metal skid underneath the entire fuel tank.
08:22Some people put plastic skid plates under there, and they call them skid plates. This is a legitimate
08:27steel skid plate. So there aren't many parts in this truck that you can't drag on a rock
08:33and not be safe. We're getting close to the hill here. I'm going to need four low for this one,
08:40so I've got to actually stop the truck, shift into neutral. We've got four low, it's shifting,
08:50and we've locked the rear axle. Okay, back into drive, and we're ready to rock here.
09:03So this is a one big feature of new trucks that we're missing on the Warlock. I'm not a big fan
09:09of lots of technology in trucks, but I've gotten spoiled with forward-facing cameras. That's one
09:15thing the Warlock doesn't have. It's got the backup camera, but not a camera that will let
09:20you see in front of the truck. So we're just going to have to do it the old-fashioned way here and
09:27look out the windshield. So we're still four low, everything's locked. We're going as slow
09:34as the truck will let us go. We're basically idling, and we're just going to let the
09:40Hurricane in line six and that locked rear axle push us right up this hill.
09:48So we've got a couple ruts here, some basketball-sized rocks. If I stay on my line,
09:56there we go. Okay, trying to stay steady on the throttle here and just let the tires dig.
10:04Now this is decently steep.
10:09All right, and it's doing really good. If you listen close, you can hear the tires just
10:16biting into the dirt. You can feel the suspension flexing when a tire gets up on the rock.
10:23Coming to the top of the hill here, that locked rear
10:28differential just pushed us up that entire hill. Now cresting the top of the hill, this is where
10:35I'd want that forward-facing camera to see what's right over top here, but we're doing fine.
10:42And that was a pretty steep one, and we made that without even a struggle. All right, so let's go
10:49see if it can do an even harder hill climb here. I've got the window down here for extra spotting
10:56capabilities, and let's crawl. We've got to pay close attention to that front bumper.
11:08All right, oh, we're using all four tires here.
11:11All right, the tires are gripping. As long as we don't slide and cave in the passenger door.
11:19Oh, I think we got it. Now, we don't have rock sliders here, so I've got to be extra careful right now.
11:30Struggled a little bit.
11:31All right, almost up and over, and we got it.
11:37The Warlock just continues to impress. That hill was fit for a Jeep, and we did it in the Warlock.
11:44Yeah, taking that off-road hardware from the Rebel. At the 33-inch tires, the Bilstein shocks,
11:53and all the skid plates, it's just a lot of fun.
11:56The 33-inch tires, the Bilstein shocks, and all the skid plates, if we do absolutely mess up and need to
12:04protect something underneath. This truck can do an impressive amount of crawling
12:09for what is essentially a tradesman.
12:16We really put the Warlock through its paces out here in the desert. We started out where
12:20the Warlock is the happiest, just cruising through the bumpy back roads, and then we turned it up a
12:25little bit, and really put those Bilstein shocks and the five-link suspension to work in the whoops.
12:30Maybe bumped into the bump stops a few times, nothing too crazy. Then, we really let that
12:35hurricane engine sing in the dunes. We shifted into two-wheel drive, locked that rear axle, and this
12:41truck sent sand flying up into space. A lot better than you'd expect for a half-ton truck. After that,
12:47we slowed it way down, and did a little bit of rock crawling, and we figured out just how far
12:52you could go with this truck, with the ground clearance and those 33-inch tires. So, we barely
12:58got into all the power the Warlock has on tap. You can option this truck with up to 1,980 pounds
13:05of payload, and it can tow over 11,000 pounds, and that's more than enough to get you and your toys
13:10way out there to have fun. So, trucks that can do all that, those dedicated off-road trucks like the
13:16Ford F-150 Tremor, Silverado Trail Boss, those start well into the $60,000 range, and only
13:22get more expensive when you add options. So, the Ram 1500 Rebel is one of those trucks. Now, you don't
13:29get Ram boxes, your touchscreen isn't three feet tall, and your seats aren't trimmed in crazy Italian
13:35leather. Whatever, this is a truck. Does your truck need all that stuff? The Warlock can do just about
13:42everything the Rebel and those other trucks can do, and it can do it for less money. The Warlock
13:47starts at just over $56,000, and I've been waiting this entire video to say this, that's a ton of truck
13:55for your buck.