Not long ago, Ram thought it had dreamed up the perfect engine for its pickups. The "Hurricane," a turbocharged six-cylinder engine, would replace an archaic gas-guzzling V-8 that hadn't changed much in nearly 15 years.
The new engine would be more powerful, boast more torque, tow more and use less fuel. It was also smoother and quieter.
As it turns out, that was a major problem. Because what truck buyers and muscle-car fans love more than anything, it turns out, is the rich, throaty roar of a V-8 and the vibrations it causes.
After just one year of its new Hurricane engine, Ram brought back the old eight-cylinder engine to its lineup for 2026 model-year trucks -- and it is paying off for parent company Stellantis. Buyers can pick a truck with a Hurricane or pay more for one with an old V-8 engine, called the Hemi. Ram sales are up 22% this year, bucking an industry decline of 3%.
"It just sounds like what a truck should sound like," said Brian Ewart, a 39-year-old Kansas dad and Navy veteran who recently spent $80,000 on a Ram with the V-8.
Ewart, like others, didn't see the newer inline-six engine as reliable and robust for towing as the old-school engine. Above all, Americans, it seems, just won't give up their V-8 engines.
Automakers are now happy to oblige, especially in light of President Trump's rollback of fuel economy rules and greenhouse gas standards that once drove car engines to get smaller.
General Motors is expanding its production of V-8 engines by scrapping an earlier plan to make EV motors at a plant in western New York. Ford plans to offer V-8s on more trims in its F-150 trucks next year.
When Antonio Filosa, a company veteran, became Stellantis chief executive last year, one of his first decisions was to resurrect the V-8 engine. He said he acted on a fuller understanding of what his customers care about.
"The engine is not only efficiency and horsepower," Filosa said in an interview. "It's also emotions."
John Reed, a 55-year-old IT worker in suburban Atlanta, was ready to plunk down $60,000 on a new Ram truck last year. But he wanted a V-8 engine. So he waited until Ram brought back the older, less efficient engine this year -- and paid a $1,200 premium for it.
Last year's smaller Hurricane six-cylinder engine felt and sounded more subdued, said Mark Boniol, owner of Mark Dodge in Lake Charles, La., who sold Reed his truck.
"It was so high-pitched, it sounded like you were driving a Honda," Boniol said, adding that Ram has since made tweaks to improve the Hurricane's tone.
'That thing got a Hemi?'
Large pickup trucks are uniquely popular in the U.S. Automakers sold nearly as many large pickups -- 2.4 million -- as all types of cars -- 2.8 million -- in 2025.
Three of the five bestselling vehicle lines in the U.S. last year were trucks: Ford's F-Series, GM's Chevrolet Silverado and Stellantis' Ram, according to Motor Intelligence data. And truck buyers are often deeply loyal so the Detroit companies hunt for any edge to convince customers to switch allegiances. The performance--and mystique--of their engines are a big part. About 40% of Ram 1500 buyers today pay a premium for the V-8 engine.
Every truck owner knows Ram V-8 engines as the Hemi, named for the hemispherical shape of the engine's combustion chambers, a design that contributed to higher horsepower when parent company Chrysler introduced it in the 1950s.
It became synonymous with power thanks to stock car and drag racing in the 1960s and 70s. It was phased out in the early 1970s, right around the time the gas crisis and emissions regulations began to push large engines out of the market.
Then, in the early 2000s, Chrysler brought back the Hemi name for an all-new family of V-8 engines. A TV commercial featured two guys in a beat-up muscle car ogling a Ram truck at a stoplight. Out the window, one asks, "That thang got a Hemi?"
"Yeah," the Ram driver says. Then the light turns green and he beats them off the line even while towing a Dodge Charger on a flatbed. The Charger, too, had a Hemi. The commercial became an oft-quoted classic.
Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep and Ram have long been industry laggards in fuel economy. The company made up for it by paying billions of dollars in fines to the U.S. government and buying regulatory credits from electric-vehicle makers like Tesla to continue selling Ram pickups and Dodge Durangos with V-8 engines.
When those brands merged with Europe's PSA Group in 2021 to form Stellantis, Chief Executive Carlos Tavares -- a Portuguese national who previously led French automakers Peugeot and Citroën -- sought to change that dynamic. He wanted to end the U.S. brands' reliance on regulatory credits. Despite an awkward fit with the company's off-road Jeeps and muscular Dodges, he pushed electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids.
The Hemi V-8 began to look like an endangered species. In the early 2020s, the U.S. auto industry was preparing for what seemed to be an all-EV future, while the gas engines that did remain continued to downsize.
So Stellantis in 2023 announced that its light-duty Ram trucks, the ones commonly bought by everyday customers, would move exclusively to the new Hurricane inline six-cylinder engine.
Stellantis' U.S. market share plunged, especially as dealers said the company kept prices high. Under fire from shareholders, U.S. dealers and the United Auto Workers -- an unlikely coalition that rarely sees eye-to-eye on much -- Tavares left the company at the end of 2024.
Tavares didn't respond to a request for comment.
Upon taking over from Tavares in 2025, Filosa convened a series of strategy meetings at U.S. headquarters in Auburn Hills, Mich., just outside Detroit.
One presentation included an all-black slide. The only words were a date--June 15, 2021. It was the day the company decided to remove the Hemi from some vehicles.
Filosa also studied data showing that some 40% of truck buyers simply wrote off Ram -- whether they wanted a bigger engine or not -- because the brand didn't offer a V-8 engine.
He reversed course.
Ram would still offer the smaller, more modern six-cylinder Hurricane engines, but for a premium, would sell trucks with the old-school Hemi V-8.
In pushing the Hurricane, Stellantis had followed a decadeslong trend in the industry, where engineers have found ways to shrink engines while squeezing more performance out of them.
Going smaller and adding turbochargers -- essentially an air compressor that forces more air into an engine and causes it to produce more power -- is one way to do this. But this design typically lacks the fuller, richer sound that V-8 enthusiasts love.
Tim Kunsiskis, a Stellantis veteran who leads North American brands, said a turbocharged engine like the Hurricane sounds "smooth and linear."
But if that is classical music, he said, "a V-8 engine is rock and roll."
Most car buyers don't sweat over how many cylinders are under the hood, said industry consultant Dan Nicholson, a former vice president at General Motors. "It's only in full-size pickups that it's controversial."
When Ford introduced its "EcoBoost" twin-turbocharged V-6 engine in its F-150 bestselling pickup truck in 2010, the automaker faced the same customer skepticism that Ram now faces about whether such a motor would prove as durable.
Ford put the EcoBoost through its torture test simulating 160,000 miles and over 10 years of use, then at the 2011 Detroit Auto Show, tore it down for the public to prove its durability. The F-Series remains America's top-selling vehicle.
"They pulled off this EcoBoost thing in a way that their customers aren't really talking about it anymore," Nicholson said.
GM's famed "Small Block" V-8 engine, a design that also traces its lineage back to the 1950s, has a similar following and cachet to the Hemi, Nicholson said. Yet it has evolved considerably over the years; a sixth-generation Small Block V-8 is due out in next year's trucks.
Nicholson and Kuniskis also said the perception that smaller, turbocharged engines aren't as reliable as V-8s is mistaken.
Where Stellantis lost its way was not in developing the smaller, turbocharged Hurricane engine, but in trying to ditch the Hemi entirely, Kuniskis said.
By contrast, even as they introduced smaller and more powerful engines, Ford and GM each continued to offer V-8s in their pickups.
'Muscle Trucks'
Now, like getting an old band back together, Ram is leaning unapologetically into V-8-powered machismo.
In May, at a company proving grounds in Michigan, Kuniskis unveiled a new line of what Ram called "muscle trucks," all powered by Hemis. They now carry what's called a "Symbol of Protest," a badge featuring a charging ram's head emerging from the front of a Hemi engine block.
Showing off one truck, Kuniskis pumped his fist and revved the engine before a crowd of enthusiasts and content creators. The fans goaded Kuniskis to rip a burnout, spinning the truck's wheels in place until rubber turned into smoke.
"We just built this truck," Kuniskis said. "I'm not gonna blow it up."
It isn't clear how long Stellantis can sustain the Hemi revival. Kuniskis said it partly depends on getting the right sales mix, with more customers buying Hurricanes along with die-hards who buy the Hemi.
"I'm not saying we ever replace the Hemi again, but we need to have an alternative," he said.
Fuel-economy regulations could snap back under a different president and Congress, and even Stellantis executives expect rules to ratchet up again in coming years regardless of political leadership.
Stellantis isn't done with electrification, even as its current crop of EVs failed to find an audience and led to a $26 billion pivot, the largest write-down of the U.S. automakers.