By Gary S. Vasilash

The Ram Truck brand has announced it will unveil its Ram 1500 Revolution battery electric pickup concept at CES 2023 in Las Vegas on January 5.

“CES” used to stand for “Consumer Electronics Show.”

Now it is bigger than that.

One of the reasons it is expanded in scope in due to the auto industry which, for the past few years, has realized that attending an industry trade show full of people who are tech heat seekers is good for word of mouth, which is good for business.

Consider this: the Chevy Bolt EV was introduced on January 6, 2017 at CES. GM CEO Mary Barra made a keynote address at the event that day.

The following week in Detroit the North American International Auto Show, the venue where vehicles are ordinary unveiled, got to see the Bolt EV, too. Not a debut, of course.

What’s more, coincident with the unveiling of the Bolt EV Mary Barra and the car appeared on the cover of Wired magazine.

Vehicle OEM PR people know that writers for Car and Driver and MotorTrend have to cover vehicles like the Bolt and the Ram 1500 Revolution.

If they can get publications like Wired to cover them—that’s saying something.

A question about the Ram 1500 Revolution and CES:

Is Ram Truck positioning the vehicle as tech or a truck?

This is not to say that modern trucks don’t have a lot of tech. But it does seem that by launching it there the company is saying to the world that the truck is a marvel of advanced engineering more than this is something that someone is going to use to haul aggregate or boards or whatever.

It will most certainly have the capability to hauling that whatever and then some.

But if it can convince people who are never going to haul that this is a technically trick truck, then they may get even more market traction than they would if they introduced it at the Chicago Auto Show, an event in February where OEMs have tended to launch their trucks.