Each section below is the headline from one of the deeper analyses our data desk ran across nine months of telemetry. The big number, the why, and the receipt.
Across nine months of suburban driving, a Michigan winter, the October tow weekend, and the 781-mile Memphis haul, the Hurricane I-6 averaged 16.57 mpg — from the owner's hand-kept pump-receipt log, the ground truth. That's 17% below the EPA combined sticker. The lab number was always a ceiling, not an average. Hemi V-8 long-termers tend to land in the 12-14 mpg range on the same kind of routes, so the Hurricane is genuinely more efficient — just not sticker-efficient.
DIMO's telemetry, reconstructing fuel burn from the dash gauge and trip distance, put it at 15.77 mpg — within ~5% of the receipts. The gap is almost all distance: the device's odometer signal arrives in 10-second snapshots and runs a few percent short of the dashboard, while the gauge-derived gallons match the receipts to about 1%.
At the $3.12/gal average the owner actually paid, that's $1,954 in fuel to move 10,645 miles — about 19 cents a mile. Right in between what a Hemi V-8 would have cost on the same drives and what a hybrid F-150 would have saved.
A real tow leaves two fingerprints in the data: fuel economy collapses (7–10 mpg vs. 17–22 unloaded) and the engine spikes RPM hard pulling away from stops. Either alone is noise — we caught a false alarm once when the driver bumped the steering-wheel gear-limiter down a notch. Both signals together are unambiguous.
Result: four confirmed tow trips, all clustered on one October MasterCraft wake-boat weekend.
Our Ram lived through a full Detroit winter. The coldest morning we logged was 3.2 °F ambient. The engine block was at negative sixteen Celsius cold-soak, and the coolant climbed back to operating temperature in three minutes twenty-two seconds. Seventy-seven mornings the truck started under freezing.
The warm-up curve below traces that worst morning — coolant temperature on the y-axis, seconds on the x. The Hurricane I-6 doesn't dawdle.
Every few minutes for nine months, DIMO asked the Ram's engine computer: "Any problems?" Every time, the answer was no. A vehicle history report tells you what was reported. This tells you what was measured, every three minutes, by the engine itself. One is a claim. The other is a receipt.
A Laramie's remote-start feature is one of the headline reasons salesmen tick the box for buyers in cold country. The owner of this truck genuinely lives in that climate — saw 77 sub-32 °F starts — and used the remote start twelve times. Once every twenty-two days.
Less a knock on the feature than on how features get sold. The brochure says remote start is the reason to buy a Laramie for cold country. The honest answer from one Michigan winter on this exact truck is twelve.
DIMO's behavior detector flags two kinds of moments: an extreme braking event (a hard stab on the pedal that decelerates faster than normal traffic) and a harsh-cornering event (a turn taken with more lateral G than the suspension was tuned to absorb without complaint). Cluster them by 150-meter hex and the same five intersections show up over and over — the daily commute pattern of one driver, mostly southeast Michigan, with one Ann Arbor outlier.
A useful map if you're handing keys to a new driver. The hotspots aren't dangerous intersections in the abstract; they're the corners where this driver already tends to brake or turn harder than the average. Patterns repeat. If a parent wanted to know where their teen needs a few extra rehearsal laps before driving solo, the truck's own data tells you.