Modern American pickups are not meant for tiny English villages.
carwowYouTubeA couple years ago, I drove a Ford Fiesta ST in the U.K. and it quickly became obvious why the Fiesta is consistently one of the best sellers in the country: It’s the right size. The roads in the U.K. are tiny, as are the villages, as are the motorway service stations, etc. Roads that would be classified as one-way in the U.S. are two-way. If you encounter someone and there’s not enough room to squeeze through, one of you will just have to back up to find a wider section of road.
Obviously, much of America is not like this. Sure, New York City or Philadelphia have some narrow streets and its drivers will often thread needles around double-parked cars, but most of America is huge and built to accommodate large vehicles. Here in the States, a RAM TRX only seems a little big. In the U.K., it makes houses look small.
I winced through this whole Carwow video with host Mat Watson driving a Hennessy-tuned Ram TRX through a sleepy English village. If you took a drink after every time Watson says “sorry,” you’d end up in the hospital. It’s not that the TRX doesn’t physically fit in the U.K., culturally, it’s just all wrong. Its presence is an affront to everyone around it. Probably doesn’t help that it’s yellow.
Watson manages not to hit anything in his time with the TRX, though that doesn’t prove that you can use a truck like this in the U.K. Quite the contrary. It’s just too much stress, and even if you can deal with the size, you’d have to just totally not care about what anyone else thought about you. For Americans, that’s easy. For Brits, I’m not so sure.
Chris Perkins Senior Editor Chris Perkins is the Web Editor for Road & Track magazine.
Keyword: Watching Someone Drive a RAM TRX In the U.K. Might Give You a Panic Attack