Last weekend, Stellantis held its big Roadkill Nights event in Detroit, a celebration of all things Mopar and muscular. In addition to drag racing on Woodward, announcing pricing of the inline-six-powered Dodge Charger, and showing off the Dodge Durango SRT Hellcat Jailbreak, Ram was on hand with, among other things, a mechanical bull called the Bucking HEMI. Well, at the end of the weekend, the truck brand put out a statement. The themed mechanical bull had gone missing, and Ram was seeking leads.
Evidently, the situation caused a stir at head office, with Ram boss Tim Kuniskis saying in a statement, “This is bull****. Our Bucking HEMI was taken on Saturday evening. The search is officially on, and we won’t stop searching until we get him back.” Strong words, but considering how expensive mechanical bulls are, a level of annoyance seems justified.
Cut to a few days later, and the saga of the missing amusement ride has devolved into serious drama, as the Oakland County Sheriff is claiming that nobody stole the bull. As Fox 2 Detroit reports:
“The company never actually lost the bull,” [Sheriff Michael] Bouchard said in a statement. “I find this to be very frustrating and a tremendous waste of valuable investigative time. Now, we’re pivoting to see if a crime was committed by the filing of a false police report.”
Wait, if the disappearance of the bull was a hoax, why file a police report? Well, according to Ram, it wasn’t some marketing stunt. As the truck brand told the Detroit News:
Ram spokesman Nick Cappa responded that the Bucking Hemi shell really had turned up missing Saturday night as teardown occurred for Roadkill Nights festivities, and calls were initially made to ensure no one with the company had it — prior to a police report being filed.
Cappa said a contractor for Roadkill reached out to Ram Wednesday to say they had it. The contractor, located several hours away, planned to return the mechanical bull by Thursday morning, the spokesman said.
See, that seems like a more plausible story. Event teardown is often a hasty, messier-than-expected process, and in my own experience, things have occasionally ended up in the wrong spots. A table being misplaced, a piece of electronic equipment going home with someone who doesn’t own it, you know how it goes. A mechanical bull is a difficult thing to misplace, but could it have gone home with a contractor? Quite possibly, yeah.
Needless to say, we’ve reached out to Stellantis for comment because this whole situation seems like it’s messier than it needs to be. For now though, it seems that Ram has located the mechanical bull, but any potential legal fallout from the debacle is yet to be seen.
Top graphic image: Ram
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Carlos Tavares (sadly not pictured above) is probably holding it for ransom.
Isn’t getting V8s stolen kind of their thing?
Bad spark plugs or wires can cause bucking, did they try that?
I expect to seeca lot of hate posts because well Dodge
What a load of bull. Buck you, Dodge.
More embarrassingly for Ram, they built a bull ride in the shape of a V8 because THEY didn’t want you to have it. This is not the company I want to give money to for my next car.
First Dodge promotes street takeovers, then RAM files a false police report. Next thing you know, Jeep is going to get charged with aggravated menacing and Chrysler will be found to have built a shed only four feet from the property line without obtaining a variance
Da ya suppose ol’ Timster there is simply preoccupied with his shit getting stolen because “Jailbreak” is quite literally part of the naming scheme of the company’s special editions?
Can’t wait until the Durango “Embezzler, Insider Trading Edition” comes out.
Now that Roadkill is dead, I hate that they still use “Roadkill Nights” for this event.
The magazine side of MotorTrend still owns all of the Roadkill trademarks etc. except the TV show that they sold to Discovery
I’d love to see stellantis “executives” in jail no matter what reason they write down on the report LOL
“It’s free advertising” – Someone at Stellantis
Ugh. Event/tradeshow tear-down. The low ebb of the soul. The people doing the tear-down are often the same folks who worked the whole event, and enjoyed none of the advertised fun bits. Everyone is tired (esp if the was a pre-show crunch to create the stuff for the event), and they just want to get it all boxed up and away and back to their hotel room. Yeah, stuff gets misplaced. And then nobody looks at what they shipped back until a few days later, and someone goes… ummmm, guys? Why do we have a mechanical bull? I once worked a tradeshow where my laptop was stolen during setup. I was so mad, as I was watching it as I worked and nobody suspicious entered our booth. Wasn’t until after the end of the show when we all got home days later that I got a call. Another employee of my company thought it was their team’s “backup” laptop, grabbed it and threw it in their car trunk. The reason I missed is that someone I knew had “stolen” it. Events, man…
Those executives who were in attendance are, somehow, never to be found when it’s time to teardown despite all the “teambuilding” comments of a show.
You know what helps build teams? Getting all that crap somehow back into the boxes it was shipped in after spending three+ days on your feet talking with people about business for 20h/day, with little-to-no-sleep, and eating less-than-ideal meals.
Hanlon’s Razor
Roadkill contractor: “Oh, they did notice. Guess we better return it. Like, tomorrow.”
Not much backbone – they’ll take bull from anybody.
Yeah, I bet the contractor knew exactly what they were doing and figured with all the things that normally go on with teardowns that no one would notice and it’d be an awesome item to stick in the corner of someone’s game room. Then with all the publicity it was easy enough to just say ‘whoops our bad’.
Stellantis, Dodge, Jeep, and Ram continue to excel at being as deeply cringey as possible. We thought a few years ago Stellantis hit rock bottom, turns out that was just rock middle.
That was rock bottom for FCA, Stellantis brought a bigger shovel to the party and kept on digging.
Just wait until Ram learns the mechanical bull was powered by electricity.
So it’s a liberal pussy?! MAKE IT ROLL COAL OR I AIN’T RIDIN
Complete with fake engine sounds??
God this is the stupidest company of all time.
One of the things that always puzzles me about the people that buy from brands like this is the fact that the company is outright disdainful of them. Like RAM is laughing AT you, not with you. They assume you’re a stupid goddamn idiot who can be easily separated from their money.
I’m not going to sit here and claim I’m immune to marketing and don’t have any brand loyalties but like….I’d have a very hard time handing money over to a brand that’s just openly and assuming my masculinity is as fragile as a wet sheet of toilet paper and that my IQ hovers at room temperature.
I truly believe the leadership at Ram/Dodge thinks this kind of thing is actually cool, though. Ordinarily yes, I’d agree that no company could be this cringey or transparent in its marketing to suburban tactical snowflakes, but after the last few years it’s becoming clear to me that this is not an act and they genuinely suck this much.
That has to be one of the most American things I’ve seen this week.
Sadly, this is true.
I’m guessing Stellantis will not use that contractor again.
Unless he was the cheapest possible contractor, then they will absolutely use him again.
That’s fair
With all this free press? Of course they will.
Unless he had some particular reason to move a huge ram-head mechanical bull to NC, sounds suspicious.
They have to be nice to everyone. That may be the next company to own them.
A bucking ram dressed up as their V8 BADGE OF PROTEST!!!! Just when you think we’ve hit cringe rock bottom, RAM finds a way to go lower. I don’t think the average RAM driver could last 3 seconds on this thing without having an asthma attack, pissing themselves, and emptying the entire clip of their glovebox gun into it in fury….
and miss.
They’ll miss all 15 shots, somehow kill an innocent bystander, be let off the hook by one of Trump’s judges, then go on the manosphere podcast circuit to talk about how they were victimized by the bystander they murdered and cancel culture.
Wonder if these chodes list “victim” as their occupation on the taxes they probably don’t even file.
Sigh. I remember a time when this would have been hyperbole.
RIP satire
It was fun while it lasted….