Home Forums Gear Hunting Trucks and Four-Wheel Drives Newer diesel which one?

Some of you guys are so funny, you like living in the past as if things were made so much better back then, which they weren’t! I owned a 1997 3500 with Cummins, 2001 2500 with Cummins and while those motors were simpler than today’s the trucks had a lot of issues that kept a guy at the dealership regularly. I most recently had a 2014 Ram 2500 with a Cummins , drove it for 3 years and put almost 60,000 miles on it and it never went to the dealership for anything. Regularly got 20+ mpg on the highway and 18 mixed driving. I towed a 8000 lb boat from Central Texas to Venice,La in 100 deg heat several times and got 12-13 mpg and the truck didn’t even know it was back there. When I sold the boat I didn’t feel the need to have a diesel so I sold it. Been running a F150 for the last year and a half and since moving to Colorado I’ve been looking at Cabover campers and after looking at the ultralight campers that fit in the little F150 bed I decided that I want more. Plus I’ve been putting a lot of miles on the truck running all over this state and really didn’t want to end up with a ECO with 100,000 miles in 4 years . So I started shopping diesels again in the last month. GM is out of their mind, a nicely equipped duramax was way more than I wanted to spend. The F250’s in a nice packaged lariat was also quite high and after talking with a few guys that run the newer Ford diesels it seems they have quite a few quirks in their sensory. I ended up at the rams which IMO are at the point now where this 4th gen has had most of its quirks worked out (though I never experienced any in my last one) the Cummins with the 4th gen DEF is really pretty simple and not a hinderance like the DPF crap was. Was able to negotiate a really good price on a loaded Laramie and couldn’t be happier. This was my last nice truck purchase since I’ll be retiring before I’ll have the itch for a new truck, and kinda spoiled myself, never bought a truck that’s got all the goodies this one does. Had it two weeks now and after 1,012 miles of driving it it’s performing awesome! This pic is the readout since new for all my driving.




97 3500 worked hard but always being worked on



2001 Solid truck that ran great but had a mechanic on standby and Alaska winters ate seals from front to back every winter. Front end replaced after every other oil change!



2014 problem free