“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.”—F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Ram 1500 TRX is an exaggerated pickup truck. It has a 6.2-liter supercharged HEMI V8 engine that produces 702 horsepower and 650 lb.-ft. of torque and allows the full-size pickup truck to have a top speed of 118 mph and go from 0-60 mph in 4.5 seconds, 0-100 mph in 10.5 seconds and quarter mile in 12.9 seconds at 108 mph. It has a ground clearance of 11.8 inches and 35-inch tires (if you are rolling in a Honda CR-V know that the ground clearance is 7.8 inches and the tires are a maximum of 19 inches in diameter, more likely to be 17 inches). The interior is exquisite, with acres of suede and leather. And then there is the Harman Kardon 12-channel, 19-speaker, 900-watt audio system with a 10-inch subwoofer and active noise cancellation.
You could drive across a desert and climb a mountain in one of these things in absolute comfort. You could blow the doors off of competitors in muscle cars from a standing start at a stop light. You could drive around town and know that there are very few people anywhere who also have a TRX and feel the pride of exclusivity.
You would spend more than $70,000 on this vehicle (starting MSRP: $70,295).
(And you may be wondering: “Did I somehow get on the MotorTrend website?”)
If there is a vehicle that screams (thanks to the supercharger) and bellows (thanks to that V8) “heavy metal,” then it has to be the Ram 1500 TRX.
It is powerful, raucous and yet tuned and orchestrated to deliver raw power.
Which brings me back to the rich. And rock.
The Lamborghini Urus is an SUV. A sport utility vehicle. It starts at $218,000. It has a 4.0-liter V8 twin-turbo that produces 650 hp and 627 lb-ft of torque.
Clearly, this is not your ordinary, run-of-the-mill vehicle that is likely to be in the queue pickup up the kids from the elementary outside of Santa Barbara.
I bring the Urus up because I was surprised to see Lamborghini boasting that one of its owners is “Tony Iommi, guitarist and king of riffs with legendary ‘monsters of rock’ Black Sabbath.”
The folks at the azienda automobilistica explain that there is apparently a connection between its super-quick and non-trivially expensive vehicles and one of the original heavy-metal bands: “Automobili Lamborghini and Black Sabbath. . .share an ability to remain true to their unmistakable values. While many bands were adapting and adjusting their musical approach to the trends of the moment, Black Sabbath maintained a potent and consistent identity throughout the course of their epic careers.”
And they quote Iommi, sounding like a white-shoed car dealer who can say more words and provide less content than most people: “We started the heavy metal genre. . . . Music changes as it goes on, but ours has pretty much stayed the same, because that’s what we do: when you’re involved in something and it’s in you, that’s what you play. We have improved it over the years, but we retained the original thing.”
Huh?
Iommi, 73 and worth on the order of $140-million says, “I think travelling days are over for me. Now it’s nice to be in one spot for a bit, and—I can’t believe it—this is the longest I’ve ever been in one place. But when it will be possible to travel again I’ll drive the Urus to our house down in Sandbanks, by the sea in Dorset.”*
That mention of “sand” brings me back to the TRX: it has what is claimed to be the largest air filter in the segment that has four-times the dust-trapping capacity of the competition and a special cooling circuit so the engine gets all of the air that it needs, even when blasting through sand.**
Blasting through sand the way a rock star would.
I thought.
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*For those thinking that it sounds like it might be a nice place, it evidently is, as in 2018 the UK’s Daily Mail reported that a stretch of road on the peninsula was the “most expensive stretch of coastal real estate in the world.”
**This is in no way a recommendation to or endorsement of ripping up the environment in an over-powered vehicle that guzzles gasoline in copious quantities, just an observation of what would be expected behavior.
Photo via Lamborghini.