Ram exhaust brake at slow speeds.

transamz9 wrote:

blofgren wrote:
As stated in this thread you definitely need to be in "Full" exhaust brake mode while towing (one press of the exhaust brake button). Two presses of the button puts it into "Auto" mode which I personally find a bit useless. I run mine in full all the time, even when driving solo.

Proper gear selection is critical as well. My truck is a 6 speed manual and my fiver weighs about 16k lbs loaded. Back in August we crossed Stevens Pass in Washington twice and I descended the pass mostly in 4th gear and the exhaust brake in full mode. I only touched the service brakes once on each side and actually had to give the truck throttle a few times and upshift to 5th gear because it was slowing us too much! Once you get more familiar with the truck you will learn which gear you need to be in for the grade/road conditions and you will find the exhaust brake works awesome.

As mentioned earlier, one of the major advantages to the manual transmission is that the exhaust brake works in all gears right down to 1,000 rpm. I find this is fantastic for descending large grades in campgrounds because I don't need to use the service brakes at all; this combined with the zero throttle launch feature means the truck just crawls around on it's own with the trailer in tow!

With the hand shaker being down 35 hp and 200 lbft of torque I'll just use my buttons on my shifter to manually shift my truck. I get slowed down to the point my exhaust brake don't work my foot brake will.

Definitely a matter of personal preference; I like the manual transmission and the increased reliability it gives over the auto. I also don't think that the difference in HP/torque at the rear wheels is nearly as much as the advertised numbers due to losses in the auto slushbox. But that's a whole different topic ;)