1986 Dodge Ram 50: The Mitsubishi-Built Compact Pickup That Punched Above Its Size

Long before compact trucks became a mainstream segment in North America, Dodge was selling one that wasn’t even built in America. The Ram 50 — also known as the D-50 — arrived in showrooms starting in 1979 and stuck around until 1994, the product of Chrysler’s decades-long arrangement with Mitsubishi Motors. Mitsubishi handled production in Japan; Chrysler handled the badges and the dealer network.

For its modest footprint, the truck carried a surprisingly serious rating: a payload capacity of 1,500 pounds. That figure put the little Ram 50 in the same conversation as pickups a size class above it, which is exactly the kind of statistic that made these captive-import compacts appealing to buyers who wanted utility without a full-size footprint.

This particular example is a 1986 model, and it has surfaced in the barn-find world — the sort of vehicle that quietly survives decades in storage while more glamorous machines get scrapped or restored. Compact Japanese pickups from the 1980s have been steadily gaining attention among collectors, partly because so few clean ones remain.

With Mitsubishi’s engineering underneath and Dodge’s branding on top, the Ram 50 occupies a strange but interesting corner of truck history: a partnership machine that delivered honest work-truck capability in a package small enough to fit almost anywhere.