Designing The Ram Heavy Duty Truck
Building a heavy-duty truck like the 2025 Ram 2500 and 3500 includes not just ensuring it can tow and haul and get work done. It also has to be comfortable enough to manage road trips while standing up to rigorous work days that include dirt and muck. I sat down with Jon Gaudreau, Director of Interior Design at Ram to learn how he turns a truck into a tool that’s both rugged and refined.
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2025 Ram 3500
- Base MSRP
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$46,570
- Base Trim Engine
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6.4L V8
- Base Trim Transmission
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8-speed automatic
- Base Trim Horsepower
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405 hp
The Interior Is Designed To Feel Familiar
Gaudreau’s design philosophy follows a simple idea. Since a truck is a tool for getting work done, how do you bring that idea into the cab? “Any design project, I’m always looking for ways to make a connection between what you’re doing and what it needs to do,” Gaudreau said of the relationship between the vehicle and the driver. He landed on a clever analogy. “Can you put a wrench on it, with the bolt on the wrench and the interlocking and the chamfered shape of the bolt?”
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The interior doesn’t literally look like wrenches and nuts. It’s more subtle. “It’s not meant to be something that a customer or someone who looks at it says, oh yeah, it looks like a wrench on a bolt,” Gaudreau said. Instead, it’s about a vibe. “It’s more meant to be a subconscious connection to things that we’re familiar with,” he said.
“It should look like it’s appropriate for a truck.”
– Jon Gaudreau, Director of Interior Design, Ram
Balancing Tough and Pretty
Trucks live hard lives. One day they’re towing a trailer of supplies, the next, they’re towing a camper on a road trip. It’s a challenge to design an interior that’s durable enough for the job site but still nice enough for a family adventure. “It needs to be able to take a beating a little bit. It needs to look strong,” Gaudreau said. He points to the interlocking shapes, like the air vents weaving into the center stack, as a visual cue of toughness. “It’s giving the feeling that it’s strong,” he explained.
Materials are also a key part of the design. “The textures we choose are optimized for scratch and mar,” Gaudreau said. Every surface is engineered to shrug off abuse, which is bound to happen in a work truck or an off-road truck like the Rebel. And the seats? They face the infamous Butt Scrub Test.
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“There’s a mannequin, if you can imagine, and the butt is weighted to simulate a person and there’s a robotic arm that will take it from outside and scooch it across the seat and sit it down,” Gaudreau said. The idea is to recreate years of your butt scooching across those seats thousands of times. This is all a part of ensuring that the heavy-duty lineup withstands the wear and tear of daily life for as long as you own your truck.
“There’s a lot of detail that goes into the texture itself that is meant to be less easily scratched.”
– Jon Gaudreau, Director of Interior Design, Ram
The Cowboy Truck And Hammer Time
Ram’s lineup isn’t one-size-fits-all. Take the Longhorn. Gaudreau calls it “the cowboy truck.” The Longhorn would look right at home at a rodeo with all its leather trim and has a personality all its own, just like its target customer. “We are looking for ways to tailor the design to that personality,” Gaudreau said. One of the ways he and his team create these personalities is with hammers.“We have the analogy of a hammer for every job,” he explained. Each model gets its own hammer to match its style.
“We select a hammer for each truck model.” – Jon Gaudreau, Director of Interior Design, Ram
He literally has a set of hammers sitting on his desk to represent each vehicle in the lineup. For the Longhorn, it’s an artisan hammer with a leather-wrapped handle and filigree detailing in the hammer head. Compare that to the Laramie hammer, which has cast metal that includes a smooth machined face. The Tradesman gets its own hammer, one that’s more simple and utilitarian. Different hammers for different jobs. Different trucks for different people.
The Big Challenge, Function Meets Form
Designing a truck interior isn’t just about looks. Utility is key. Take the center console with its sliding cup holders, phone shelf, and space for a 15-inch laptop. It wasn’t easy to perfect. “That’s probably the biggest challenge is having all these functional utility features and finding the best balance of the shapes, what it looks like, what it does,” he added. Prioritizing one feature, like the perfect place for a wireless charging pad, could mess up how the cup holders work. It’s a constant trade-off.
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One of Gaudreau’s favorite features is the infotainment touchscreen. It’s easy to reach without having to lean too far forward, and it looks like it belongs on the dashboard. “It doesn’t feel like we just bought an iPad,” he noted. It’s seamlessly integrated, unlike some large screens that feel as though they were just stuck in the middle of the dash. Gaudreau doesn’t just design truck interiors. He crafts tools that look and feel right, whether you’re hauling hay or just heading to the store.
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