Ram Releases Photos Of 2025 Ram Heavy Duty Without Camo, But We’re Begging Ram To Put It Back On

Surprise! This is the updated 2025 Ram HD pickup truck, and although we don’t have many details on it, Ram is giving the world a full, undisguised look ahead of the truck’s launch. It’s a weird move, but there’s actually some sound justification for it. Here’s the full statement from the makers of this rig:

As we approach the reveal of our 2025 Ram Heavy Duty, the engineering teams are conducting final testing on one of the most important performance attributes of our heavy haulers: cooling. As the trucks will be running loose in the wild, with the camouflage removed, we wanted to share some quality exterior images with you rather than a badly lit snapshot out the window at 70 mph.

The formal reveal of the 2025 Ram Heavy Duty will take place at a later date. At that time, we will provide more details on design, powertrain and technology.

Alright, so although dropping full-on photos of a new vehicle without releasing details may sound weird, Stellantis has good reason to. It’s ridiculously hard to test cooling capability with camouflage on, and leaks often spoil hype. If these trucks are going to be tested on public roads undisguised, it makes sense to get ahead of the story, right?

There’s just one problem I can see — it seems like nobody actually took a step back from the clay model because my word, this has to be the least visually attractive Ram truck ever.

[Editor’s Note: I actually think the new truck looks decent, especially compared to the 2006-2008 Ram:

Yikes! -DT]

America is going through a phase of over-mawed heavy duty pickup trucks. Certain trims of Ford Super Duty have a grille that looks like the element on an electric oven. The Chevrolet Silverado HD looks like someone crashed the clay model into a shipping container nose-first. The GMC Sierra HD looks like its grille surround was designed in Microsoft Word. Check these out:

But none of them hold a candle to the bizarro stuff going on with the 2025 Ram HD.

Just look at the front end on the Rebel trim. This thing has vertical slats, horizontal slats, an entirely different type of mesh in the lower grille, weird almost-lung-shaped elements, and it’s all just so busy. You almost get the sense that the point at which to stop adding styling elements was long ago, and that the finished product might’ve been better if someone just paused more often in the design process. The current model isn’t a huge looker either, but this is just such a fuss.

Zooming on on the other trims shown off, the monochrome treatment on the red three-quarter ton is better, but still busy. Merely having two styles of grilles on one truck is an improvement over three, but the grille silhouette is overstyled compared to the one on most trims of the current truck, and surely there has to be a better way of integrating the radar sensor, right? Oh, and painting the entire front of the work truck trim satin black is certainly a choice, but it feels more like an attempt at disguising sins than anything else. On the plus side, if you do like simplicity, both the cab and the bed seem to be shared with the previous generation of heavy duty Ram, and while that is an ancient truck, if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it, right?

Part of the trouble is that massive grilles are a technical requirement for getting the cooling system capability that heavy duty truck customers need. If you’re pulling something like a loaded enclosed two-car trailer up a mountain, you don’t want your rig overheating, so big radiators and big airflow are critical. At the same time, there has to be a more tasteful way of styling around those needs than this. Maybe if NHTSA gets its way with revised pedestrian safety standards, we could see handsome heavy duty pickups again. Or maybe it’ll go the other direction. Who knows. The distant future’s hard to predict, but the near future is going to have this bizarre looking truck on the roadway before you know it. Oink.

(Photo credits: Ram, Dodge, Ford, Chevrolet, GMC)

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