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 stop-and-go, a Michigan winter, a real towing weekend, and one 781-mile interstate haul, the Hurricane I-6 turned in 19.96 mpg lifetime — within 0.04 of the EPA combined sticker. That doesn't happen in half-tons. The conventional wisdom is that EPA combined is a ceiling, not an average; Hemi-V-8 long-termers historically land in the twelve to fourteen range.
At $3.40 average pump price, that's $1,665.76 to move 9,777 miles — about 17 cents per mile, fuel only. Honest middle ground between a Hemi catastrophe and a hybrid F-150 savings story.
Our first towing detector relied on the ratio of engine revolutions per mile per hour — unloaded highway cruise sits at about 26 RPM/MPH; towing pushes it well above 30. Clean enough — until February, when the detector flagged a non-tow trip where the driver had bumped the steering-wheel gear-limiter down a notch and the ratio elevated for an entirely different reason.
Detection v2 demands two signals agree before flagging a trip as a real tow: fuel economy under 12 mpg AND peak RPM above 3,300 in a low-speed acceleration. Either alone is noise. Both together are unambiguous. Result: 4 confirmed tow trips, all clustered on the October MasterCraft weekend that Frank wrote up in Update 4.
The Ram lived through a full Detroit winter. On the coldest morning recorded, the dongle saw ambient air at 3.2 °F, the engine block at negative sixteen Celsius, and the coolant temperature climbed from cold-soak 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?" The answer came back ninety-three thousand seven hundred twenty-four times, and every single one was no. That's not absence of bad news. That's ninety-three thousand timestamped, verifiable receipts of good health — something no used-car listing, no Carfax report, and no dealer inspection can match.
The traditional vehicle history report tells you what was reported. This is what was measured: by the engine itself, every three minutes, anchored to a cryptographically signed data stream. The difference is the difference between a claim and 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.
That's not a knock on the feature; it's a knock on how features get sold. When the brochure tells you remote start is the reason to buy a Laramie for Michigan winters, the honest answer from one Michigan winter, on this exact truck, is twelve.