SEMA 2007 Preview: Dodge Ram BFT
Source: Chrysler Communications, Mike Ellis Posted: 10-28-07 03:30 PT
© 2007 PickupTruck.com

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One owner of Clydesdales thought that the standard eight-foot bed on his pickup truck just wasn’t enough room for all the hay he needed to haul to feed his horses.

“The more bed you can give him the better,” said Scott Krugger, Chrysler Senior Designer in the Advanced Exterior Studio. “One thing they always say is they can never get enough bed.”

With customers like the Clydesdale horse owner in mind, Krugger and Mark Allen, Chief Designer of the Jeep/Dodge Truck Studios, designed the Dodge Ram BFT, the SEMA concept vehicle that will appear at the 2007 SEMA show in Las Vegas.

“The whole idea behind the BFT is we have the ultimate in passenger occupancy and capacity in the mega cab. So we said ‘What if we go the other direction with that. What if we go the ultimate in bed size’,” Krugger said.

The design team took a Dodge Ram 3500 Heavy Duty pickup truck, and replaced the mega cab with a standard cab. That gave them room to extend the eight-foot box out another two foot. The team also accommodated the dually setup with a 6-in. suspension lift kit from Superlift and Alcoa’s 22.5-in. 10-lug semi wheels. The Ram BFT also features full-length polished bed and step rails and a Mopar hood scoop. The Ram BFT is powered by a 6.7-liter Cummins turbodiesel mated to an automatic transmission.

It all makes for one BFT – or “big fine truck” that is “built for towing”.

“Kind of the cherry on top was the Big Dog chopper that we put on the back,” Krugger said. “Many people can put motorcycles on the back of their truck, especially with their tailgate down."

But Krugger said he and Allen wanted to play up the length, "with the Big Dog chopper in the back, with the tailgate up, just to kind of show off the length.”

The goal of the design team was to make the Ram BFT look proportionally just right, so that it might look like a production vehicle. “We kind of wanted to have a little bit of mystery to it,” Krugger said.