A LONG-TERM TEST, TOLD BY DATA

DETROITto MemphisAND BACK.

1,150 MILES23 HOURS, 47 MINUTES OF DRIVING7 DAYS21 – 27 DECEMBER 2025
PUBLISHED WITH ON-CHAIN CONSENT · SACD GRANT #183644 · HOW ↗
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§ 01 / 10
THE TEST TRUCK

NINE MONTHS.
ONE PICKUP.
EVERY HEARTBEAT.

Ram 1500 placeholder
Ram 1500 on a cold December highway. Placeholder image.

We plugged a coin-sized dongle into the OBD port of a 2025 Ram 1500 and let it talk. For two hundred sixty-three days, it did. Three point nine million times. Then, to publish this page, we asked the owner's permission — and got it in the form of a cryptographic grant on the Polygon blockchain.

MakeRam
Model1500
Year2025
DeviceRuptela R1
NetworkDIMO · Polygon
Token ID183644 ↗
Activated27 JUL 2025
Signals captured3,938,654
§ 02 / 10
BY THE NUMBERS

WHAT 263 DAYS
LOOK LIKE.

Every one of the numbers below came out of a database the vehicle owner, not the manufacturer, controls.

§ 03 / 10
EVERYWHERE IT WENT

885,361 GPS fixes, plotted. The Ram's whole life from Detroit base-camp to the Gulf Coast — every two-lane shoulder and interstate mile, every idle-in-a-parking-lot minute. Follow the glow.

PRIVACY MODE: EXACT GPS · AS RECEIVED FROM CAR
“
This isn't a simulation. This is how a truck actually lived, on real asphalt, for nine months straight.
— FROM THE DATA
THE HAUL · 21 – 27 DECEMBER 2025

ONE BIG
ROUND-TRIP.

The Ram pointed south before sunrise on the twenty-first. It spent Christmas in Memphis, an overnight in Lexington on the way home, and rolled back into the Detroit suburbs at dusk on the twenty-seventh. Seven days. Three states. One thousand one hundred fifty miles. Play it below.

TIMESUN DEC 21 · 04:36 AM
DISTANCE0.0 MI
CURRENT SPEED0 MPH
LEG1 · DETROIT DEPARTURE
—
SUN 21 DEC · 04:36 · DETROIT METRO

A Pre-Dawn Splash of Fuel.

Twenty-seven minutes on quiet suburban streets. A gas-station stop, a coffee stop — whatever the routine, the Ram was warming up for something bigger. Outside air: 34°F.

SUN 21 DEC · 11:08 · I-75 SOUTH

Detroit Fades in the Mirror.

The first real push south. Three hours, forty-nine minutes, three hundred miles of interstate and Ohio farmland. Cruise set just under seventy-five.

SUN 21 DEC · 16:59 · ELIZABETHTOWN

The Long Leg to Memphis.

Three hundred seventeen miles. Five hours, seventeen minutes. The sun setting behind the windshield somewhere outside Bowling Green. This is the one the truck was built for.

MON 22 – FRI 26 DEC · MEMPHIS

Five Days on the Mississippi.

Christmas in Tennessee. The Ram logs short loops around Memphis — thirty-minute runs to pick up groceries, a late-night drive on the twenty-third, a quiet Christmas morning that never reaches highway speed. The engine runs cold and brief.

FRI 26 DEC · 14:09 · LEAVING MEMPHIS

Pointing the Grille North.

The hardest part is always the first mile home. Six hours and thirteen minutes of driving today — Memphis to Jackson TN, then up through Nashville and into Kentucky. Overnight stop: Lexington.

SAT 27 DEC · 13:44 · LEXINGTON KY

One Last Push to the Suburbs.

The closer. Five and a half hours north on I-75 through Cincinnati, Dayton, Toledo. The sun sets over Ohio. Outside temperature drops from 41°F to 28°F as the Ram crosses back into Michigan.

SAT 27 DEC · 19:29 · DETROIT METRO

Home. 1,150 Miles Later.

The Ram rolled back into its home coordinates at seven-twenty-nine in the evening. Sixty-one gallons of fuel burned. Twenty-three hours, forty-seven minutes of driving. Nine days since it last slept here.

ALTITUDE OVER THE HAUL · FEET ABOVE SEA LEVEL
“
The dongle doesn't lie. It counted every heartbeat — and it counted them two thousand five hundred thirty-four times that the driver stood on the brake pedal.
— ON THE BEHAVIOR DATA
§ 05 / 10
THE TRIP LIBRARY

EVERY
MILE ON FILE.

Thirty of the Ram's biggest drives, picked from the five hundred fifty-five trips logged over nine months. Click any one and watch it replay on the map. Sort by distance, duration, or date.

TRIP—
DISTANCE—
DURATION—
TOP SPEED—
CURRENT—
§ 06 / 10
DRIVER PROFILE

LEAD FOOT.
LATE BRAKER.

Nine months of throttle-position and engine-speed readings paint a fingerprint. This driver likes the right-hand pedal and waits until the last second to stand on the left one.

Brakes & Corners per Month

The Records

Hard brakes2,534
Harsh corners1,161
Hard brakes / 1,000 mi243
Top speed recorded103 MPH
Longest single trip5 H 17 M
Highest engine RPM5,628
VERDICT: Spirited. Accelerates like he means it, brakes like he didn't see it coming. Rate of hard-brake events exceeds the DIMO fleet median. The Ram's 5.7L Hemi logged an instantaneous engine-speed peak of 5,628 RPM — an I-75 merge, probably.
§ 07 / 10
REAL-WORLD FUEL

31 TANKS.
ZERO LIES.

The fuel-level sensor doesn't care about the EPA combined rating. It just ticks down with every mile and back up at every pump. Here's the truth, plotted, across two hundred sixty-three days.

§ 07.5 / 10
RIGHT FOOT, REVEALED

EVERY THROTTLE
STAB, MAPPED.

Six thousand samples of throttle position vs. engine speed. Color = vehicle speed. The cluster reveals the driver's habit: heavy on launch, eager on the highway, gentle nowhere.

§ 08 / 10
THE RHYTHM

WHEN & HOW
IT LIVED.

Pull out the clock and the calendar. This is the shape of the Ram's week.

DRIVING DENSITY · DAY OF WEEK × HOUR OF DAY
LOW-VOLTAGE BATTERY · WEEKLY MEDIAN
The R1 dongle watches the 12V system. Dips into the 11s mean a cold morning — or trouble.
ODOMETER · CUMULATIVE
Flat spells = parked. Steep climbs = road trips. The Christmas haul is the biggest kink.
IDLE TIME · ENGINE ON, WHEELS STILL
Forty-seven idle segments detected over nine months — drive-thrus, warm-ups, conversations in parking lots. Total engine-running stationary time, plotted by month.
§ 09 / 10
THE RECORDS

SUPERLATIVES.

TOP SPEED · ALL TIME
103
MPH · 165 KM/H
I-75 SOUTH · PROBABLY A MERGE
LONGEST TRIP
5:17
HOURS · ELIZABETHTOWN → MEMPHIS
LATEST DRIVE
03:14
AM · ONE COLD MORNING
TANKS PUMPED
31
REFUELS · ROUGHLY 775 GALLONS
IDLE HOURS
9.1
SITTING STILL · ENGINE RUNNING
§ 09.5 / 10
THE EVENTS

WHERE THE TRUCK
GOT MAD AT ITSELF.

Three thousand six hundred ninety-five behavior events. Each one a hard brake or a harsh corner, flagged in real time by the R1 dongle and stamped with the location where it happened. Cluster them on a map and the Ram's bad habits become geography.

HARD BRAKE · 2,534 HARSH CORNER · 1,161
§ 10 / 10
HOW IT WORKS

WHO OWNS
THIS DATA?

The owner does. Every one of those three point nine million signals is anchored to a non-fungible token on Polygon — a deed of sorts — minted the day the Ram's dongle shipped.

To publish this article, MotorTrend asked the owner for permission. The owner signed a SACD grant on-chain — a cryptographic agreement scoped to exactly the data you see above. Ten minutes. No contracts, no middleman.

DIMO, the protocol, indexed it. Ruptela, the hardware, produced it. MotorTrend, the publisher, told the story. The Ram just did the driving.

The counter-factual. Without DIMO, this data would live inside Stellantis's servers, and this article would not exist. None of it. The owner would know their truck is collecting data — they just wouldn't be the one deciding who gets to read it.

CAR · 2025 RAM 1500
↓
RUPTELA R1 · OBD DONGLE
↓
DIMO NETWORK · TELEMETRY PIPELINE
↓
NFT #183644 · POLYGON
↓
OWNER WALLET · SIGNED SACD GRANT
↓
MOTORTREND · THIS PAGE
RAW DATA

TAKE IT
WITH YOU.

Every byte of this story is yours. Download the raw telemetry behind every chart on this page. CSV, JSON, and JSONL.

signals.csv
3,938,654 rows · 1.24 GB
Every individual telemetry reading. Long format: subject, timestamp, signal name, value. Nineteen signals over 263 days.
events.csv
3,695 rows · 1.0 MB
Behavior events — hard brakes, harsh corners — with CloudEvent metadata and precise timestamps.
segments.jsonl
662 rows · 513 KB
Detected trips and activity windows. Start/end location, duration, refuel and idle segments too.
data_summary.json
Metadata · 6 KB
Per-signal firstSeen / lastSeen / count. Start here if you just want to know what's in the box.
trip_dec21.json
Hero trip · 814 KB
Detroit → Memphis, 21 Dec 2025. Downsampled points, speed, RPM, throttle — the full replay payload.
heatmap.json
20,000 points · 415 KB
Sampled GPS fixes across nine months — the dataset powering the everywhere-it-went map above.
LICENSE · CC BY 4.0 · CREDIT MOTORTREND × DIMO · QUERY THE ORIGINAL VIA DIMO TELEMETRY API ↗
WRITER'S NOTE
“Editable by MotorTrend staff. Drop your reflection on living with the data here — the stat that surprised you, the moment the heatmap lit up like a confession, the night the truck refused to start. The grant from the owner included permission to write whatever you actually saw.”
— THE WRITER · MOTORTREND

YOUR CAR
HAS A STORY
TOO.

Connect any post-2008 vehicle, get a Ruptela R1 dongle, and within a week your own version of this page can exist. The data is the truck's. The control is yours.

CONNECT A VEHICLE → READ THE MOTORTREND ARTICLE →