many of you saw last week when we shared how easy it is to be overweight in an RV we promised we were going to let you guys know what we did in our situation and so today we going to be sharing the four reasons we switched to a Ram 3500 duly short bud and potentially two big problems that come with it but first let's give you guys a quick tour of that new tow vehicle well here we go guys this is the 2024 Ram 3500 Mega ABAB dly it is the diamond black Crystal color with the night Edition so this package basically blacks out all the badging lights gives you black rims and adds the Sport Hood no other manufacturer really doing one like this and we really like the look this is a ly trim truck which is kind of a medium level trim similar to the Ford's Lariat and Chevy's LTZ I think so the obvious unique thing on this truck is that it's a four-door mega cab giving it about 10 extra in in the back seat also it has the 6 4 in bed which is pretty small compared to the full 8T beds because of this combo the overall length is around 248 in or about 20 1/2 ft long we were big fans of the Polar right superglide automatic hitch in our Ford short bed and we partnered with them again on this even shorter Ram short bed and because it has such a short bed an auto slider like this is really the only way you can be sure your fifth wheel doesn't hit your truck as it slides the fifth wheel back while turning I think in 2023 Ram redesign their tow mirrors and they give you full power standard and convex glass as well as power telescoping and heated mirrors I like these a lot as you can power move the convex mirror but I also really like the size of the Ford tow mirors RAM does a great job on their Interiors as well although many RAM fans are waiting for the big updates in 2025 the vertical 12-in Center screen is pretty cool and almost acts like a big cell phone layout because of it I do miss some of the physical buttons we had in the Ford but overall this is a really nice and comfortable interior it has the heated and ventilated front seats as well as the heated steering wheel one thing it doesn't have that I'm bummed about is a 360 camera system Ram makes that an option instead of now standard on the Fords while it's not necessary it is nice to have in these larger trucks but the really cool thing is the large flat folding back seat which gives our two dogs Lou and June their own space with a bit more room than normal they are really liking it back there and I know it will be great on long travel days so while the bed storage is smaller the inside back seat storage is larger under the hood is the 67 high output inline 6 diesel which has 420 horsepower and 1,75 ft-lb of torque when you get the high output motor it also pairs in the Eisen heavy duty six-speed transmission which is a great combination for people that tow fulltime like us while we like the Ford power stroke and 10 speed I have read this Ram high output can be hard to beat okay the number one reason that we upgraded to the new vehicle is just because the numbers did not work out on our last truck you might think that's crazy with a 1ton F350 and a short 33 ft fifth wheel but really it comes down to how heavy your RV is and while we wanted to stay around 15,000 lb we were actually much closer to 17,000 lb big difference yeah so some of you might have been asking well couldn't you just shave some of that weight out of the RV and if you remember me saying that about 20% of your fifth wheel weight transfers to your truck so really you got to lose a lot of weight out of your RV to get that off of your tow vehicle so just a round number of 1,000 lb is only going to be 200 lb of hit weight off the vehicle and 1,000 lb is a lot to ditch it really is so we went kind of the other way and we wanted to get everything out of the vehicle first because that's 100% weight in the vehicle and we basically got rid of everything we could so we did spend a lot of time trying to remove the truck from the weight shuffling stuff around and we even had a lot of purge sessions where we tried to get rid of as much stuff stff as possible yeah I think we actually did after the truck moved to the RV and spent a good day or two trying to get rid of as as much as we could and I think we did shave off a couple hundred lbs but the problem with that is again you're trying to make this decision to get rid of this weight when really you have to get rid of a lot of weight out of your RV to even make it work so we got rid of things like our dog kennel that we don't use all the time but I'm probably going to regret so all of that weight is really just pushing the limits of a single rear wheel on ton and don't get me wrong there are a lot of on tons out there that do have higher gross vehicle weight ratings than we had you know even upwards of like 12,400 lb and maybe even you know 4 to 4500 lb of payload but still it's pushing those upper numbers and that leads us to the next reason we upgraded to a doui which is for more future proofing and to give us more options in the future and not end up in the situation where we're really maxing out what we have and so in our thought process we did have those two options do we go with the new single rear wheel or do we go with the duly and in my mind I was a big stickler on if we're going to go through this process again where we buy a new truck whether it's new or used it doesn't matter if we're switching our truck the last thing I want is for us to be on the end of limits and we're still constantly watching our numbers with every decision that we do and there really was a lot of pros and cons so that single rear wheel we could be within our limits and we don't 100% know where we're going in the future like for example what if we decide to go smaller in that scenario a single rear wheel makes a lot more sense you know what if we want to get back to the travel trailer days you know maybe in like an airst stream or something so while I was kind of more on the single rear wheel side like Chris said she had a good argument for the dly and after really really talking about it it did make a lot of sense to go that route I never saw us in a douly I just I never even thought about it but the reality is is that we are full-time rvers the majority of our time is Towing this fifth wheel and when it all comes down to it we need to make things we need to make decisions that make sense for right now so if you remember some of those numbers that I talked about in the last video with the single rear wheel well the D le really does give you a lot more leeway our last truck was 11,500 on the gross vehicle weight some of the single rear wheels go up to 12,400 but a duly gives you 14,000 lb of gross vehicle weight and that axle that I was talking about that was way overloaded you now have a much higher capacity closer to 10,000 lb and and the payload numbers go well over 5,000 lb big difference yes our actual payload on this truck is 5400 lb so that gives us options in the future to go with a bigger fifth wheel or not even necessarily bigger but heavier if we wanted something that weighed around 20,000 or maybe even up to 24,000 lb you know it's an option what if in the future we want to do something like a truck camper you know really get back to our old van days and have that smaller unit um maybe not as fulltime like we were in a van cuz it's tough to do after so many years but what if we have a house one day what if we want to use that truck and truck camper to go out and do these fun excursions yeah and it gets to be stressful when you're going through all of these different scenarios because there are so many wh ifs in every direction yes it was a very difficult decision weighing these two trucks and the more you think about it and the more options you consider the more overwhelming it can feel and RAM might not have been my number one choice you know we're a Ford family over here and so we started looking at F350 dues and anybody that looks at an F350 dly has to consider an F450 just because you know it has those upgraded Brakes and Tires it has that wide front axle giving you that better turn radius and it's just it's a pretty cool truck that gives you a lot of options in the RV World yeah I was actually really excited to be part of the 450 Club for a while yeah and that brings me to the next reason that we are in this Ram 3500 and that's because almost all of the Ford dealerships we were talking with were acting like it was 2022 we're in this huge vehicle shortage and it's not 2022 anymore we're into 2024 and the vehicle Market is way different than was years ago Ford was still acting crazy doing markups on vehicles not wanting to give any discounts and actually some of the one-year-old f450s I was looking at with 15,000 mil they wanted to charge over MSRP from what they were the year prior so basically you're buying a used vehicle and you're spending more than what MSRP is and that's just crazy yeah so you could buy a new one for less than the one-year-old and it was just it was kind of unbelievable so the only way to get a discount on the Fords was to order one and wait that four to 6 months and I will agree that Ford is a little bit more practical with their MSR pre pricing if I could say that over Ram who has a little bit of an inflated one but now Ram is giving good discounts off of their trucks and believe it or not Ram offered us the ram dealers offered us more for our Ford tradein than the Ford dealerships were so I don't know why but I felt like all of these Ford dealerships were just pushing me away and pushing me into the ram decision yeah and there was a lot of moving pieces with the prices and the value of the tradein the value of a tradein was a huge deal for us because our truck was so new and with the logistics of us living full-time in our RV it really red ruled out the option for us to outright sell privately it just would be much too complicated to time the purchase with the sail with the hitches and the towing and that sounds like a logistical Nightmare and I will say as a side note that I do really like the Aesthetics of the ram douy I think they make one of the best looking dues out there you know that is very personal opinion of course I loved the f450s as well but Ram just makes a really really really Nic looking dly and we couldn't beat it couldn't pass it up even I have to say it's pretty gnarly looking the next reason we upgraded to a short bed duly is because it's actually about an inch or two shorter than our previous four-door Ford short bed and that is a big deal to us we want this truck to be as userfriendly as possible because it is our our daily driver yeah we really enjoyed the short bed on the Ford and we knew we wanted to keep this one small especially when you're adding that with of a dual when you add that with plus the long bed that turns your truck into a beast a really big beast and for the small times that we do drive it without Towing we wanted that to be manageable especially for parking yes for reference this short bed Ram duly is about a foot shorter than the long bed RAM and I think it's close to 18 in shorter than the Ford long bed truck yeah and of course with the trucks you know you back them in to a space as much as you can but even with reversing into a space you're still limited by things like sidewalks fences bushes barricades there will be times where you can't take your rear tire all the way to the curb when you're parking and the longer of an overhang of a bed you have the the more your front is going to stick out and I've noticed over the years that a lot of the Downtown parking at a lot of places we go and visit is street parking so it's nice to not Park your big truck in a parking lot but go onto the street you're going to get a lot less door dings that way yeah and really those spots are about 20 ft long so we just barely squeezed into them in our Ford this Ram duly is going to work fine but if you have a 24t like when we had the bike rack on the back of our Ford we just didn't fit in those spots you end up taking two spots and you're going to come back probably to a ticket yeah and it's also worth discussing parking your truck at your RV site you know a lot of these sites are crammed small the ones that we go to our anyway and even parking our Ford short bed with our small 33t travel trailer or fifth wheel we were sometimes having to get strategic on how you park the truck so we knew that getting a long bed would make that even more difficult and a lot of parks have like overflow parking where you can take your big long bed dues and park them way over there but we like having our truck right on our site we can go in and out of it however we want and you don't have to worry about it and the fourth and final reason that we switched to a dly truck is because we do this fulltime we probably put 90 plus% of the miles on the vehicle while Towing which is probably the opposite of most people where they're maybe only Towing 10% of the time yeah so we travel around the country fulltime believe it or not we are in year six and we like to travel as we are doing this so we try to circle the states about once a year and it's around 12 to 15,000 miles per year while doing that and that's really low really low mileage but you do need to make make those decisions based off what you're currently doing and since that is the majority of Our Lives is Towing you know the Dual just made so much sense for the numbers and for how we are using the truck we want the focus to be more on the travel and the rving and the fun not worrying about the numbers if we're overweight if we're underweight not worrying about where we're going if we're Towing up or down mountains or any of that stuff we want this to be as stressfree as possible so speaking of stressfree there are two potential big problems that come with this particular short bed douly and I want to talk about those now so the biggest and most obvious one is the short bed douly has a short bed it's 6'4 in in this Ram over the typical long bed truck which is 8 ft for some people that's an absolute noo they want that 8ft bed they need it for hauling they need it for storage um it gives you more hitch options you don't have to go with the sliding hitch if you don't want to you know an 8ft bed makes a lot of sense for our beers but we don't use our truck bed for storage we're perfectly happy having a large slider in the back of that thing we really don't use our truck bed for much at all the only thing we really use it for is to throw our ebikes in on Excursion days yeah and that's something we love to do and there's still plenty of room to throw the ebikes back there and the second and not so obvious problem from the outside is that these shortbed Ram dues do not have the large fuel tank so only in the longest configurations do the manufacturers include this big tank so Ford has a 48 gallon tank that they include with their four-door long bed Ram gives you an option for a 50-gallon tank in their four-door long bed but really that's too bad that in these short bed configurations you you're stuck with a smaller tank so ours is 31 Gall and we were used to a 34 gallon in the Ford and we're probably going to get even lower miles per gallon with the DU we really liked the power stroke engine that was in the Ford now we're in the ram cumin high output and it's a V8 verse uh inline 6 we have the six-speed icing Transmission in the ram over the 10-speed and the Ford so I don't don't know what the mileage is going to look like it it'll probably be similar but yeah it might be a little less that was a lot of engine talk and you got you got like fired up during that now not all hope is lost you can add aftermarket tanks and they make them around 50 gallons for these short beds but the big downfall is the price you have to spend $3 $1,00 on the tank itself and if you do the installation yourself then you're saving money there but if you don't it could be another $500 so a pretty hefty option to get those extra gallons yeah and we all know how fun projects are when you're a full-time rver and you don't have dedicated garage or tools or clean spaces to do anything it's not fun well there you have it those are the reasons that we switched did we make the right decision did we make the wrong decision let us know down below we appreciate everybody watching and we'll see you on the next video ever wonder where the name Irene iron travels comes from it's actually named after my online Fitness and Nutrition coaching business Irene iron Fitness I help people move better feel better and eat better with strength training and real food no fad diets No harsh restrictions no counting calories and absolutely no processed food in a package if you want to get stronger and feel better at any age check the description below for the links with my new client special or 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