We are now on our 5th Ram (plus 1 Dakota) in the last 20 years. Suffice it to say, I am quite familiar with the variety of configurations and engine packages by now. We have had a 5.3L V-8, a 4.7L V-8, a 3.6L V-6 and the 3.0L V-6 Ecodiesel. My favorite overall, taking my specific applications into mind, has been the 3.6L Pentastar.
My wife and I started traveling extensively after retiring nearly 10 years ago, mostly to see the country and document our travels on our YouTube travel channel. In an effort to cut down on travel costs, we traded in the V-8 for the Pentastar in September of 2013. I found it quite remarkable .... much quieter cabin from the V-8, better than expected performance and startling fuel economy. Our first cross country trip covered 8,600 miles mostly traveling the smaller highways and 2 lane byways of this great land. Upon returning home, I ran all the numbers (hand calculated) to find that we had average 22.4 mpg for the entire trip.
We then started traveling with small travel trailers and the Pentastar was perfect for this application. Our second TT was a 3,500 lb rig that we pulled coast to coast in 2014. Covering 8,300 miles on that trip, the numbers worked out to an average of 14.3 mpg. I found this to be quite acceptable by anyone's towing standards.
We had so much fun that we decided to invest in a larger unit with a slide out, but weighing in at 6,000 lbs loaded. The Pentastar had no trouble pulling the new trailer home (although EVIC indicated only 12.8 mpg) and no trouble getting down our very long and steep driveway. Imagine our excitement as we prepared to leave on our first trip with the new TT up to Great Smokies National Park to see the fall colors. Now imagine our surprise when we found out that the 2WD with no "anti-spin" rear axle, wasn't able to pull the 6,000 trailer back up our steep 40 degree driveway. Just not enough traction with the one drive wheel. The "traction control" basically just kept switching drive from one wheel to the other. We tried everything but nothing worked. At this point I figured that we had just bought a new "room addition" to the house.
We decided that we'd have to trade in our beloved Pentastar for a 4x4 model and since I had been eyeing the new Ecodiesel since I first read about it years prior, we bought a 2015 Eco built Nov.5th in 2014. With 410 lbs ft of torque and 4x4 drive train with anti-spin axle, we now had no difficulty getting up our driveway. We towed the 6,000 lb TT with the Eco over 9,000 miles and averaged about 13.5 mpg with it.
We also discovered after owning 3 travel trailers in 2 years that the RV industry didn't deserve our business as all of them were poorly built with no pride in workmanship and prone to multiple failures causing nothing but frustration. We decided to abandon the RV lifestyle completely and go back to our camping roots. I also came to realize that I am not the typical "diesel folk". These guys are fanatical about their passion for their diesels and I simply wasn't at that level. I found the emissions systems very complicated (with questionable reliability) and the idiosyncrasies of ownership to be unnecessary. Since we didn't have the need to pull the heavy TT anymore, we spent a lot of time trying to find another Pentastar with the same relative trim level and thankfully found a 2016 at a dealership in a neighboring state. We are now back into our beloved Pentastar (and our first experience with the chocolate brown interior).
It's perfect for our new found traveling lifestyle as you can see in the attached link ......... (watch in 1080p)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxINLzuxJg0