The 2021 ProMaster will address the needs of mobile vocational businesses and final mile delivery with “the highest level of advanced safety features ever on a Ram ProMaster,” announced Dave Sowers, head of Ram Commercial marketing, at the 2020 Work Truck Show in Indianapolis.
The new software-driven safety assist features are enabled by a suite of cameras and sensors that will allow for better visibility and obstacle awareness, while even automatically course-correcting on windy roadways. These options include:
- Forward collision warning and active emergency braking: Forward looking radar senses danger and the system takes action “to avoid or mitigate the highest energy of collisions where the opportunity or the risk for property damage or injury is the greatest,” Sowers said.
- Blind spot monitoring Rear fascia sensors scan the sides and back of the van for objects and alert the driver for vehicles, pedestrians or other objects to in their blind spots.
- Perpendicular Warning: Those same sensors are used while in reverse to look cross paths and detect and warn of approaching vehicles, pedestrians or other moving objects. “This type of feature will pay big dividends in those tight workspaces and urban delivery environments,” Sowers noted.
- Crosswind Assist: This addition, which will come standard with the electronic stability control suite, takes control of the steering to correct for high crosswind situations.
- Digital Rear-view Mirror: Cargo, gear, and partitions in full-size vans often obstruct rearward visibility. Ram solves this issue with a high resolution camera mounted on the van’s rear, which projects a real-time view to the display that replaces the traditional mirror. “We think this is a killer app in the van space,” Sowers said. “This really provides a solution that no one else has for van customers and will make the ProMaster even easier and more effective for that business customer.”
A key factor for all these sophisticated solutions is making operating commercial vehicles less complicated for less experienced commercial drivers.
“You have a great plumber, that doesn't mean he's a great driver. If you have someone in a catering business, that doesn't mean they're experts at driving a large commercial vehicle. The more that we can make this like a passenger car experience, the better they will be,” Sowers explained
Production commences in July 2020 with sales beginning that September.
This builds on the 2020 Class 2 full-size van offering, which boasts “best in class standard cargo height, best in class cargo width by almost five inches and lowest step-in height,” Sowers said, adding the ProMaster has “more cubic volume per dollar than any competitor.”
Ram expects the space to avoid the downtrend of heavy duty transportation.
“The segment that we play in was up 8% last year in an overall flat industry and we expect that to be stable to up again this year,” said Dave Sowers, head of Ram Commercial marketing.
