Ram set up an off-road demo course at the 2026 Oklahoma State Fair to flex the capabilities of its latest pickups. Then a 98-year-old Ford sedan rolled through it without breaking a sweat.
A video posted by Davis Auto Ranch on YouTube shows a bone-stock 1928 Ford Model A tackling the course Ram built for its 2027 trucks. The Model A isn’t some restomod with a modern chassis swapped underneath. It looks entirely original, and it handled every obstacle on the course like it was built for exactly this.
The car drove over a series of moguls without hesitation. Its nearly century-old suspension flexed smoothly, absorbing the uneven terrain the way a purpose-built off-road rig would. The comments section had a field day.
Several observers pointed out the obvious: the Model A was engineered for a world where paved roads were the exception, not the rule. Dirt, ruts, and uneven ground were the daily reality for drivers in 1928. Ford built these cars to survive that world. So in a sense, putting one on a manufactured dirt course is less a stunt than a homecoming.
The course itself wasn’t exactly Moab. It was dirt piled on flat fairgrounds, the kind of temporary setup manufacturers use at events to give potential buyers and media a taste of capability without anyone getting hurt or equipment getting wrecked. These demos are easy to build anywhere, safe for inexperienced drivers, and they let brands control the narrative.
The problem is the narrative fell apart the moment that Model A showed up.
Ram, a brand that trades heavily on toughness and trail-ready credibility, got upstaged by a four-door sedan that predates World War II. The whole point of these demos is to make the trucks look capable, to justify the rugged marketing and the premium pricing. When a car your great-grandfather might have driven to church handles the same course with zero drama, that pitch loses its teeth.
No one is arguing a 1928 Ford can match a modern Ram pickup in deep sand, rock crawling, or high-speed desert running. A new Ram has locking differentials, electronic traction control, adjustable ride height, and hundreds more horsepower. The gap in real-world capability is enormous.
But capability only matters when it’s tested. Ram chose a test so gentle that it accidentally proved how little you actually need to get through it. The course was supposed to sell trucks. Instead it sold nostalgia.
Ford made trucks on a modified version of the Model A chassis back in the late 1920s. This wasn’t even one of those. It was the sedan, the family car, the one nobody would have called rugged in any era. And it still rolled through Ram’s purpose-built demo like it was running errands on a country road in 1929.
Somewhere in Stellantis marketing, someone is probably rethinking the difficulty settings for the next fair.
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