With this truck most of my driving is on mostly flat highway doing 75 MPH, often times 600 miles a week. It is well past where it feels like it would like another shift plus I am going to do some stuff to give it more very low RPM TQ. It has short 15 inch tires, the rams with the same engine had the same gears and much taller 16" tires, more weight and worse aeromatics and still went down the highway just fine so I am sure it can easily pull the higher gear. This is why the dakota never got much better MPG than a ram, the engine was turning much more RPM than nessacary.