2017 Ram 2500 Laramie Longhorn Review: Putting a Luxury Truck to Work
The 2017 Ram 2500 Laramie Longhorn is a premium luxury pickup, but it still possess all of the capabilities of a proper ¾-ton heavy duty work truck.
The 2017 Ram 2500 Laramie Longhorn Crew Cab 4×4 is a big, beautiful truck inside and out. The exterior package featuring a two-tone paint scheme, tons of chrome trim and the big, bold, chrome RAM grille work together to leave no question that this is a luxury package.
On the inside, the Laramie Longhorn package features premium heated/cooled leather seats with a western saddle-style design and the belt buckle-styled emblem stamped into the seatbacks. The western theme from the seats continues throughout the cabin, with a unique trim around all of the gauges and seatback pockets modeled after saddle bags. Finally, the Laramie Longhorn package includes the award winning UConnect 8.4 infotainment system with navigation and integrated controls for every aspect of the vehicle – from the heated seats to the exterior cameras.
The Laramie Longhorn package transforms the hand-nosed Ram 2500 into a beautiful luxury truck, but it does so without compromising any of the working capabilities. To prove that, I put the luxurious Ram 2500 to the toughest test I know – the horse show.
The horse show weekend begins by hauling two horses in a trailer packed full of supplies for the weekend, with the bed of the truck and the back seat filled as well. Once at the show, we unload the truck and trailer and drop the trailer, but the truck isn’t done working just yet. Horse shows lead to long, hot days, so our truck spends long hours idling with the air conditioning blasting so that between rounds, my wife has somewhere to cool off. After driving us back and forth from home to the show grounds each day, we load the truck back up, hook up the trailer and head home.
Our test of the 2017 Ram 2500 Laramie Longhorn started when we packed the bed full of the larger items that we would need for the weekend. This particular Ram 2500 had the RamBox Cargo Management system, which makes controlling the load and transporting smaller items much easier. Some people insist that the RamBox design cuts into bed space, but what little you lose in bed space you more than make up with the convenience of Ram’s innovative system.
In the bed, we packed the compressed shavings and several bales of bagged hay, adjusting the easy-to-use divider to hold that all towards the front of the bed, making room for the large metal cart that we loaded behind the adjustable “wall”. In the RamBox compartments in the bedsides, we loaded our chairs and some of the grooming supplies, which opened up room in the trailer for things like muck buckets and water buckets. Having the RamBox compartments made hauling some of the smaller items easier, making it less of a challenge to make all of the other dirtier items fit in the bed and in our 2-horse trailer. Overall, while the RamBox system does technically reduce bed space, we were able to fit more items in the Ram 2500 bed with the RamBox system than I can fit in my own Ram bed without the RamBox, while also being able to stow things which could blow out of my bed.
Next, we began to load up the interior of the 2017 Ram 2500 Laramie Longhorn. In the truck we carry items which we do not want moving around or getting dirty in the trailer or truck bed, including the saddles, my wife’s show clothes and the other items that the horse wears while at the event. We buckle the saddles in to the outboard seating positions and with some trucks – even full sized trucks – the bulkiness of the saddle fills the area between the rear seat and the back of the front seat. As you can see in the image below, the large rear seating area of the Ram 2500 Crew Cab left plenty of room for other items between the seats after the saddles had been buckled in, so once again, this truck was easier more accommodating when loading it up. Really, we could have put even more things inside of the truck, had I not wants to keep the dirtier items out of the premium cabin.
Once we had everything loaded into the bed and cabin of the 2017 Ram 2500 Laramie Longhorn, we had to make a quick trip to the tack store before hitching up the horse trailer. During that short drive, I learned that the added weight has absolutely no impact on the performance of this big diesel Ram. The 6.7L Cummins Turbo Diesel packs so much power and so much low end torque that adding a few hundred pounds to the bed doesn’t even make for a noticeable difference in acceleration or braking. Of course, the heavy duty suspension wasn’t affected by a few hundred pounds either – so the Ram 2500 cornered just the same with that extra weight.
The next task was the toughest, as we loaded up the horse trailer with our champion show horses and set off on a 2-hour drive with the 5,500lb trailer in tow. This 5,500lb load is well below the towing capacity of this Ram 2500, but in the horse show world, this is a very common load and this is the load which I use for every truck and SUV which I put through this test. With 370 horsepower and 800lb-ft of torque, pulling my “little” test trailer was a breeze for the loaded Ram, with both low end acceleration and highway acceleration being nearly as strong with the trailer as it was without.
Our 2-hour drive consisted of paved local roads, highways and unpaved local roads, and the Ram 2500 pulled the trailer with ease in every situation, leaving little question that this truck could pull a significantly larger trailer. In addition to having plenty of pulling power, the Ram 2500 never felt like the trailer or the light load was pushing the truck around on the road at all and thanks to the integrated exhaust brake, slowing down was effortless. In fact, having tested quite a few trucks with factory-equipped engine brakes over the past few years, I found that the system in the Ram 2500 did the best job of slowing the combo down, both at highway speeds and around town.
Once at the show, we unloaded everything and the Ram 2500 Laramie Longhorn became out plush mobile living room, with the front and rear seats providing plenty of space to stretch out between the different stages of the competition.
After a long day of idling in the heat on the final day of the show, we packed the Ram 2500 back up, hooked up the trailer, loaded the horses and headed home. Even with running pretty much all day with the AC blasting at the show grounds, the Ram 2500 pulled home our show horses, our supplies and a collection of blue ribbons without so much as breaking a sweat. Also, the backup camera system makes hitching up the trailer very simple, which is a nice feature after a long, hot weekend.
Best of all, over the course of a long, hot weekend with plenty of towing, hauling and idling, the Ram 2500 still averaged 17.1 miles per gallon.
The Ram 2500 Laramie Longhorn might have a premium exterior design and a luxurious cabin, but it can do all of the work of any ¾-ton truck in America.
