Although not exclusive to the brand, the Hemi engine has become synonymous with the products of the Chrysler Corporation. Today’s Nice Price or No Dice Ram has a Hemi, plus AWD and some pretty cool decals. What might all that add up to in price?
In its 2010 list of the 500 Best Songs of All Time, Rolling Stone magazine ranked Wilson Pickett’s version of the song Mustang Sally at number 434. In the magazine’s latest tabulation, published just this week, the song appears to have fallen off the list entirely.
A similar fate befell the 1987 Ford Mustang GT we looked at yesterday. At a $10,000 asking, it seems that few wanted anything to do with the modified and creatively painted pony car. That resulted in a 77 percent no Dice loss.
Pony cars, and in fact cars of all ilks, have fallen out of favor of late, a fact lamented by our own Erik Shilling in his quick look at the 2021 Volkswagen Jetta GLI. The driving factor in this routing of the traditional automobile form factor has been the rise of trucks and SUVs.
Seeing as we don’t want to get left in the lurch, today let’s ponder the fate of one such truck, this 2005 Dodge Ram 1500 Daytona Edition.
At the time of this generation, Chrysler was still marketing the Ram pickups under the Dodge brand. The awkward separation of the Ram model name into its own brand wouldn’t take place until 2010. Here we are, more than a decade later, and I’ll bet most of us still refer to them as Dodge Rams.
This standard cab shorty carries another name that is has a lot of history in the Mopar universe, that being Daytona. That was taken from the venerated Florida race track where, decades ago, Dodge Daytonas and Plymouth Superbirds once traded paint and took checkered flags.
The Daytona package on the Ram 1500 adds a number of visual cues, including chromed 20-inch alloy wheels, unique rocker extensions, a model-specific Borla side-exit exhaust, and a sculpted hood with a non-functional scoop, taken from the SRT-10 truck. Most notably, however, the limited production run Daytona truck featured a bed-mounted wing that paid homage to the crazy-high wings of the old-school NASCAR Charger Daytonas. That’s matched with black stripes on the bed that further call attention to the pushcart style aero-aide.
This one comes in “Go Mango” paint with a gray cloth interior sprinkled liberally with more of the color throughout. Both the exterior and interior feature Daytona branding with a plaque on the dash noting this Daytona to be number 4,276 out of the total 2005 production run of 10,000.
Power for the Daytona comes from a 345 horsepower 5.7 liter edition of Chrysler’s tried and true Hemi V8. That’s matched with a five-speed automatic and four-wheel drive.
According to the ad, the truck comes with a clear title and a two-owner history. It has 125,000 miles on the clock and looks to be in pretty decent shape for those miles and the years it’s lived since new. The paint pops while the side stripes and wing only show modest fading from the sun. The chrome on the five-spoke flower petal wheels appears to be in good shape and the tires wrapped around those wheels seem to have plenty of tread. The ad calls out no mechanical shenanigans and nicely, the truck looks to be in the same form as when it came from the factory.
This is an expressive truck with admittedly more sport than utility. The short bed and that big wing do limit its usability as a traditional pickup truck, but then sometimes it’s more important to make a fashion statement instead of a work order, right?
The asking price is $16,900 and it’s now the time for us all to give this Ram its due and vote on it and that price. What do you think, is this Daytona special edition worth that $16,900 asking? Or, does that throwback name need a throw down over its price?
You decide!
Portland, Oregon, Craigslist, or go here if the ad disappears.
H/T to Tim G. for the hookup!
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