The 2021 Ram 1500 TRX 4x4 pickup is a specially engineered off-road truck that clearly has the Ford F-150 Raptor in its sights. The two do share a basic formula: Fit a long-travel wide track suspension, add sophisticated off-road shocks and 35-inch knobby tires, and finish it off with a powerful engine. On this last point the Ram 1500 TRX does indeed destroy the Raptor because it is fitted with a 6.2-liter Supercharged Hellcat Hemi V8 that makes 702 horsepower. The Raptor’s twin-turbo EcoBoost V6 makes 450 horsepower.

But this video concentrates on the Ram 1500 TRX suspension, which is built to shrug off high-speed desert terrain such as whoop-de-doos, washboard and deep sand. To pull this off the TRX has front and rear suspension track widths that are 6 inches wider than a regular Ram. Its 13 inches of front suspension travel and 14 inches of rear travel are a huge step up from the 9 inches found on a regular Ram 1500 4x4. The pounding of the 35-inch Goodyear off-road tires is controlled by exclusive computer-controlled and continuously adjustable Bilstein Blackhawk e2 shock absorbers with remote reservoirs and a hydraulic bump stop built inside the ones mounted up front. Out back, the Ram’s link-coil rear suspension is ready-made for this kind of serious off-road upgrade, but here the extra strength of a full-floating Dana 60 rear end is located by certain heavy-duty components that were adapted from the 2500-series Ram Power Wagon.

Many of the TRX’s dimensions are beefier than those of the Raptor. It’s an inch longer, but not at the wheelbase, which is 0.9 inches shorter. The T-Rex has 0.6 inch more front track width and 0.5 inches more rear track width. It is 1.7 inches wider at its broadest point, and stands 2.4 inches taller. It weighs about 650 pounds more, too, but the Hellcat engine more than offsets that with its extra 251 horsepower. The penalty, as you might expect, is poor fuel economy: 12 mpg combined (10 mpg city/14 mpg highway). Yikes.

The suspension is very easy to see here, because it’s hard to hide your secrets when you jack up an off-road truck and remove the tires, as I do here.

Why am I doing this? I geek out over suspension stuff. I'm a former suspension development engineer that worked for years on truck and SUV suspension development projects for two automakers at their remote desert proving grounds. Later on, I somehow stumbled into auto journalism, and for several years I created a popular photo feature called a Suspension Walkaround for Inside Line, a now-defunct offshoot of Edmunds.com (no relation). Today I have resumed writing these features under the name Suspension Deep Dive for Autoblog. Between the two outlets, over 100 of them have been published. Along the way I managed to grow a good-sized fan base, and one question I often heard was, “When are you going to make video versions?”

I never seemed to have the time, the equipment, or the confidence to get in front of the camera, but I got over that by hosting at least 80 professionally-produced videos over three years on the Edmunds You Tube channel. If you like it, please tell your friends, click subscribe, share links, give it a like and check out the other videos on my channel, which is simply called Dan Edmunds. You can also type in the channel’s alias: SuspensionTuna. And I take requests. I can't promise that I can get my hands on any car or truck, but the odds are good. And the more views I get, the more horsepower I'll have when requesting cars to examine.