The Ram Longhorn Shows That Building a Cowboy Pickup Is Tougher Than It Looks
In the 1991 comedy City Slickers—84 percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, if you haven’t seen it—three urbanites take a vacation at a ranch to cosplay as cowboys. Comedic adventures and life lessons ensue. The conc...
In the 1991 comedy City Slickers—84 percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, if you haven’t seen it—three urbanites take a vacation at a ranch to cosplay as cowboys. Comedic adventures and life lessons ensue. The concept was somewhat novel 35 years ago, but now it’s not uncommon to see cowboy hats east of the Mississippi, and the aesthetic of Southwest culture isn’t confined to places you’d imagine Wile E. Coyote chasing the Road Runner. In fact, pickup manufacturers all make some version of a fancy Western-themed trim for their trucks: Ford F-series King Ranch, Chevy Silverado High Country, Toyota Tundra 1794 Edition, and Ram 1500 Limited Longhorn. With roughly one in six pickups sold in Texas, it makes sense to give the lasso slingers what they want. But what about everyone else? Why do you see these trucks everywhere? I’m from Maine, and I don’t get it, so I drove a Ram Limited Longhorn to try to understand the appeal of the cowboy pickup.
Both the saw marks and the brand on this piece of trim will differ from truck to truck.
Ram got into the Western-luxe pickup game in 2011, when the first Longhorn debuted. Ram underestimated the appeal and the associated challenges of mass producing an aesthetic that is, at its core, about labor-intensive individualism. The company certainly understood the assignment, sourcing walnut wood trim from old fence posts that were scarred with marks from barbed wire. The problem is, there are only so many fence posts out there, and when the Longhorn took off, Ram had to figure out how to reconcile mood-board words like “vintage” and “hand-built” with “assembly line” and “repeatable quality.” To find out how they did that, I talked to the lead designer for the Longhorn, Jon Gaudreau.
The easy part, maybe, was figuring out the inspiration—leather and metalwork from Texas and the Southwest, references like saddles and boots and vintage pocket watches. Translating the whole prosperous-ranch atmosphere to a truck interior isn’t just a matter of choosing earth-tone colors and slapping on some badges, though. Just producing the Longhorn’s “barn wood” trim is an involved process.
Maybe your passenger can watch City Slickers over on that side of the dash. And don’t worry, the screen appears blank from the driver’s seat.
“When you’re going for handcrafted quality, imperfection is the desired result,” Gaudreau says. Ram attains its perfect imperfection not by traveling the country and tearing down barns, but by sawing real oak at a 45-degree angle. The saw marks are different from truck to truck—so the trim looks like salvaged wood, even if it isn’t. And where the dash wood is branded with the Longhorn logo, the final look of that too is unique to a given truck, simply because each piece of wood reacts a little bit differently to the heat of the brand. Maybe the “L” in Longhorn is a little bit darker on one truck versus another—that’s not only okay, that’s the goal.
The tag Ram came up with to assure customers that the Longhorn’s leather is actually really nice and supposed to look the way it does.
Customers don’t always understand this approach, to the point that Ram had to design hang tags for the Longhorn explaining that the leather upholstery looks the way it does by design. “It’s full aniline, the most premium grade of leather, so it has lots of natural variations,” Gaudreau says. “We had to put seat tags in explaining the leather because customers saw the imperfections and thought there was something wrong with it.” The tag reads: “Each hide of this genuine full grain leather contains markings, lines and creases which are unique. This is conclusive proof that you have purchased a truck which uses the same hand-crafted materials as a horseman's saddle. With proper care and handling your Limited Longhorn’s seats will age to a one-of-a-kind appearance.” And not how the leather seats on my Eddie Bauer Bronco aged to a one-of-a-kind appearance, with distinct tears and cracks. The Longhorn leather looks like it belongs on a $10,000 couch and smells like important decisions being made.
The Longhorn interior doesn’t smell like new car, it smells like old money.
The filigree designs on the leather trim are, like the branding on the wood, unique from truck to truck because they’re etched by lasers that vary the depth of the burns throughout the pattern. That approach exposes different colors in the leather, giving some depth to the pattern. And maybe that’s not how your favorite saddler does it, but Ram’s got a lot of holes to punch. The company doesn’t break out sales by trim, but last year it sold 374,059 trucks.
If you’ll allow me to put on my car-review Stetson for a moment, the thing I like best about the Longhorn’s particular decadence is that it’s full of really nice materials: wood, hammered aluminum, leather. It’s a rural Rolls-Royce in there. I felt like a New England imposter as far as the Texas-centric design goes, but everyone who rode in the truck loved it, and Gaudreau points out that it won’t look dated 10 years from now because it’s channeling an aesthetic that doesn’t exactly follow the whims of fashion. “It’ll age well because it’s not a trendy thing,” he says.
Plenty of room to store your maps of the Oregon Trail.
Also not trendy was the powerplant of the particular truck I drove, which had the 395-hp Hemi V-8. Yes, it sounded glorious, but I don’t get the Hemi obsession, especially in the case of a top-of-the-line truck that costs $89,085, as this one did. You’re spending that much money and opting for the least powerful engine just because it makes nice rumbling noises? I’ll take the ripping 540-hp turbocharged Hurricane inline-six, thanks. Even the standard-output six is more powerful than the Hemi and gets better fuel economy to boot (the EPA estimates that the 420-hp, 3.0-liter six will save you $800 a year on gas relative to the V-8). I don’t blame Ram for offering what people want to buy, but I’m mystified by Ram buyers who worship at the altar of turbocharged inline-sixes if they run on diesel but think that the V-8 is the only valid format for a gas engine. Is it too late to license the name “Cummins Hurricane”?
A cool badge with a dumb name that denotes the Longhorn’s least powerful engine.
Toward the end of my time with the Longhorn, my wife and I were walking out of a restaurant when a couple of guys on the sidewalk stopped us and asked us if there was a bar nearby. I pointed down the street toward one about a half-mile away and then offered to drop them off there in the Ram. They were a little bit reluctant, joking-not-joking about stranger danger, but I think the Longhorn itself helped convince them to accept a ride. To paraphrase Will Smith in “Parents Just Don't Understand,” would a lunatic drive a Ram like this? As one of the guys climbed in, he said, “Well, if this is the last thing I ever smell . . . this is really nice leather.”
Ezra Dyer is a Car and Driver senior editor and columnist. He's now based in North Carolina but still remembers how to turn right. He owns a 2009 GEM e4 and once drove 206 mph. Those facts are mutually exclusive.