It will cost Ram a lot of money to replace all the CP-4's in the 2019/2020 but boy would that be a great play for FCA against the other 2 and their class action lawsuits. Not to mention how good it would be as a marketing pitch towards Customer Care.
leeroy this isn't directed at you just responding to sort of follow up with my thoughts. I was not able to find exact numbers of Ram cummins HD trucks, as Ram does not publish those numbers to my knowledge. That said, GM does a breakdown of their HD vs 1500 truck sales, assuming it's relatively similar I was able to calculate that roughly 26% of GM trucks sold are HD trucks. I have no clue how many of the total HD trucks are diesel but for arguments sake lets say 80% of all 2500/3500 trucks are diesel. Here are some quick numbers using 26% of all ram trucks as HD and 80% of that being diesel.
| Total 2020 Ram truck sales | 563281 |
| Total 2019 Ram truck sales | 633694 |
| Total 2019-2020 Ram truck sales that are HD (26% of the combined numbers above) | 311213 |
| Total 2019-2020 Ram trucks with a 6.7 cummins (80% of the above number) | 248970 |
Now lets assume that for some odd reason FCA is paying some absurdly high price on the CP3 pump, it's still going to be cheaper, by a lot, than what you could buy it for over the counter or online. I'll go with the assumption that FCA is paying 80% of what a Bosch CP3 would go for on the market and we will call it $650. So, to replace every current 2019-2020 truck with a CP3 let's call it $1,000 with labor and parts. I think this is realistically on the super high side of things but for arguments sake it's simple. So to replace every CP4 equipped truck with a CP3 we are talking $248,970,000 thats a ton of coin. Now consider that in 2020 alone FCA brought home 7.3 billion in pre-tax earnings. Assuming they did a little less the year before we are still talking about a 250 million debt against a 14 billion profit, or 1.47% of pre-tax earnings. Is that a lot? Depends on the perspective I suppose.
One other thing to keep in mind is that each failure of the CP4 costs prob 8-12k at the FCA level using similar guesses. Assuming the absolute lowest on this (8k per truck) that means that 13% of all trucks equipped with a CP4 would have to fail for this to be a cost beneficial move. I have no idea how high the number of failures is but I would be surprised to hear it's anywhere in the double digit failure rate. That said, you still have to take into account things like brand perception, Cummins pressuring FCA as it makes their engines look bad, and the fact that they only used the pumps for 2 years and while there are owners who have well over 100k miles without fail most of these trucks probably have lower numbers and owners who are religiously using fuel additives and such to keep the pump alive, as time goes on that may slip and thus change the overall failure rate.
There is a ton of speculation here, but I think it's an interesting conversation none the less and I'll be eagerly awaiting to see how FCA handles this as that is probably the biggest sign of my long term standing with the brand.
