Trade show season is well underway in the trucking industry, and few shows hold more significance to the vocational trucking segment than NTEA’s Work Truck Week. While company announcements were largely conservative and lacked major updates as uncertainty within the industry looms, automotive’s Big Three truck makers, Ford, Ram, and General Motors, had a few updates to share with their commercial customers.
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Ram Professional
Currently, the main focus of the Ram Brand’s commercial segment is on its products.
In January, Ram launched its 2025 heavy-duty lineup, which was on display at the show in Indianapolis. The new generation of powerful pickups gets a new powertrain, featuring a Cummins 6.7L diesel engine or a 6.4L V8 Hemi gasoline engine. And back for 2025 is a column shifter that’s standard across the lineup.
Both engines are paired with a ZF TorqueFlite 8-speed transmission. The lineup’s previous generations featured transmissions with only six speeds. These additional two speeds create smoother operation when towing and hauling equipment.
The lineup also features aesthetic improvements, such as the addition of LED lights in the front and rear and new grille designs.
On the technology side, Ram brought over its latest technology from the brand’s light-duty lineup. The heavy-duty trucks are now available with bigger screens that act as camera monitors to increase the driver’s visibility when towing and maneuvering tight spaces. Customers can even receive a relocatable rear camera straight from the factory, Dave Sowers, director of Ram Professional operations, told FleetOwner at the show.
As for the brand’s Ram Professional business division, it’s just getting started
Ram Professional, the OEM's commercial-focused division, aimed to help commercial customers “become more efficient—not only through truck and van electrification but also with better telematics and preventive maintenance solutions,” as FleetOwner reported last year. And while that is a work in progress, Sowers told FleetOwner this year that Ram Professional is making progress.
“The story last year was Ram Professional needs to grow from a product and from a process perspective ... and the product piece of that is on track,” Sowers explained, referencing the launch of the all-new light-duty truck lineup in Q1 2024, the new HD lineup in Q1 2025, and a “steady cadence” of ProMaster innovations that have taken place through the recent model years—not to mention the all-electric version of the delivery van currently available for order.
Ram also expects demand for its ProMaster to grow, adding 200 ProMaster dealers to its network in 2024 alone, the brand announced in its Work Truck Week 2025 press conference.
As for the “process” side of Ram Professional, “we've got a lot of resources within our company that we're trying to bring to bear on the commercial marketplace, and that includes Stellantis Financial Services,” Sowers said. But there is commercial growth there, as well, as the group has added more commercial vehicles to its offering, with more on the way.
See also: Ram 1500 Tradesman: A work truck with unexpected perks
GM Envolve
General Motors experienced a bright 2024. The OEM celebrated being the No. 1-selling OEM for fleets in 2024 and has already seen a 17% year-over-year increase in sales for 2025, Jennifer Costabile, GM Envolve’s general director of marketing and sales, told FleetOwner.
Costabile attributes that success to GM’s wide range of products, which offer “a vehicle for every industry in every location,” including EVs.
As Tesla's EV market dominance recedes, companies like General Motors are chipping away at the EV market share of the technology company cloaked as an auto manufacturer (or the auto manufacturer cloaked as a technology—whichever you prefer). General Motors is inflicting the most damage to Tesla’s market share in the U.S. The OEM boasts the second highest total market share of EVs at 12.6%, according to Car Edge.
These numbers largely reflect the retail market, but GM has seen commercial interest in its EVs as well. Multiple companies, such as Siemens and Metro Detroit utility company DTE, have piloted or integrated the OEM’s EVs into their fleets already, and with “good reception,” Costabile said.
“The reaction to the [electric] vehicles is that it actually is a substantial cost saver over ICE variants,” Costabile said.
While at the show, a dealer shared with her that an Albany, New York-based GM customer previously delivered parts across town using a Silverado 2500. “They take a lot of gas,” Costabile pointed out. “The Silverado EV did the same thing for significantly less. There's no idling, there's no gas to fill up, and the small routes they did—even in cold weather—was not an issue.”
And speaking of GM’s “bright” 2024, the company recently brought the Brightdrop electric cargo van under its Chevrolet umbrella to expand its reach to customers with the help of more than 300 Chevrolet dealers.
On the technology front, General Motors is bringing its OnStar data capture to fleet management starting with its 2024 model year vehicles. A standard set of OnStar services is available to fleet managers with each purchase of a GM fleet vehicle.
These services are “aimed around vehicle health data, EV data to manage your fleet, and then we have connected services in the vehicle for navigation and voice commands [to] help the driver focus on getting their job done,” Michelle Calloway, director of business solutions at OnStar, told FleetOwner.
Further, for fleets already using a telematics provider, GM allows its vehicle data to be accessed by its API partners at no additional cost.
“What we've heard from customers is, if they're already working with a partner and using their [telematics] solution today, the cost of change is high,” Calloway explained, “and we want to allow them to take advantage of the great capabilities of GM vehicles in those partner applications.”
GM has also leveraged the capabilities of Lytx to provide in-cab safety alerts for drivers, such as seat belt warnings and other risky driving behaviors.
See also: GM Envolve refocuses and refines company’s fleet solutions
Ford Pro
Ford Pro also celebrated its growth at the show. While Ford Pro has only been around four years, since 2023, “the number of Ford connected commercial vehicles has grown by over 40% with 5.2 million vehicles in operation today,” Dave Prusinski, Ford Integrated Services chief revenue officer, said.
Ford Pro is using data to help fleet managers make informed decisions about their fleet, whether that’s through driver coaching, vehicle maintenance, or how to transition to EVs. Some examples of its new safety offerings include a top speed limiter and an acceleration limiter launching later this year. It has a vehicle start inhibitor that will soon allow fleet owners to prevent a vehicle from starting if it is stolen.
These updates result from an industry heading in a heavily connected direction.
“Fleets today are more intelligent than ever with increased connectivity and expanded capabilities,” Prusinski said. “We're building capabilities at the vehicle’s code level that seamlessly integrate with our fleet management solutions, something only Ford can do with our commercial vehicle.”
Ford Pro also expanded its Elite Commercial Service Centers, exclusive to commercial and fleet vehicles, to 67 locations. The company announced it hopes to total 120 by 2027 during its press conference at Work Truck Week. Including all of Ford’s service centers, the company has added more than 4,000 service technicians and 2,000 service bays to support customers.
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On the upfit side, Ford Pro showcased its VIS 2.0 in its booth. VIS 2.0, or Vehicle Integration System 2.0, simplifies work truck upfits, providing easy access to more than 100 vehicle signals without cutting into factory wiring, Andrew Brown, Ford’s Super Duty commercial brand manager, told FleetOwner.
“Before, some upfitters would have to get a brand-new truck, tear apart the dash, cut in some wires, splice in to get the signals they needed, and reassemble everything,” he said. “But now [the module is] in one location and very easy to access.”
And that’s just on the hardware side.
With VIS 2.0, Ford Pro also simplified the upfit process on the software side, allowing the upfitter to program in fully customized functions specific to the application in which the truck will be used.
“The beauty of this is that it's a pretty simple and easy-to-use logic editor, and they can use any CAN signal, signals from their upfit, whatever they want to, to create custom logic for their upfit,” Brown said.
He used the example of customizing a Ford factory key fob to unlock all the doors and drawers in a work truck service body.
