For last night’s big Super Bowl ad, Stellantis brought out famed red Ram driver and general favorite Jalopnik movie star Glen Powell to drive a jump a volcano in a Ram RHO. After recalling the last time I did the math on a Ram jump, it made me wonder — could this jump actually be possible? As it turns out, yes it is. Mostly.
First, we need some info on the volcano. The ad doesn’t give us measurements for how wide the gap is, but it does give us a yardstick to measure with: The Ram itself. A Ram RHO is 233.7 inches long, and we can use its takeoff and landing spots to determine the distance of the jump — or, at least, an estimated landing spot that’s straight across the volcano from the takeoff.
With these spots marked, we can then start measuring. I filled the jump distance with a rectangle, then filled that rectangle with copies of the Ram taken from a frame where it’s perfectly flat in the air. That gives us a jump distance of an even nine Rams, or 175 feet 3 inches.
175 feet is a lot more reasonable than the last Ram jump we calculated, especially with the ramp angle here. The walls of the volcano appear to be at about a 50 degree angle, but it’s tough to tell given the angle of the camera — it’s looking down on the volcano’s rim, meaning the angle would actually be steeper from a pure side-on shot. Watching the footage frame by frame, though, the truck does appear to level off slightly right before takeoff. Since neither of these seem particularly calculable, I’m going to say that they balance out and stick with the 50 degree number.
From there, we just need to plug the specs of the volcano and the truck into the handy dandy car jump calculator from last time. We do have to make some estimations — where the center of mass is within the Ram being the big one — but we can input our best guess. The calculator will account for aerodynamic drag, and we’ll use air density at sea level just to make things easy. If you want to determine a new air density that accounts for both the altitude of an unknown volcano and the convected heat from the lava, be my guest.
The result, at a well-within-electronic-speed-limiters 60 miles per hour? A full 179.55-foot jump, more than enough to clear our 175-foot gap. But while the data shows the jump is possible, it certainly wouldn’t look like it does in the commercial. The maximum vertical height of Powell’s jump would be a mere 54 feet above the lip of the volcano, lower than how high he appears to go in the clip. The angle of the truck at landing, too, would be far from matching the downward slope of the volcano’s far side.
Theoretically, according to the math, Glen Powell’s Super Bowl Ram RHO volcano jump is possible. Of course, this assumes that he could actually maintain 60 miles per hour on a steep climb made of loose dirt and rocks — a tall ask for a bone-stock pickup truck. Still, mathematically, it’s possible. Maybe Powell could even pull it off himself. He’s certainly no stranger to getting airborne.