In the late 1940s, Detroit had just finished winning a war. America was in an ebullient, optimistic mood. The economy was booming, suburbs were sprouting like spring weeds, and everybody was replacing cars and trucks that had largely worn out during the auto industry’s 44-month diversion to Arsenal of Democracy duty.
The folks building this new American dream needed trucks to get the job done, and when their work was done, they wanted to come home to their suburban paradise and be informed and entertained reading about their latest obsession: cars.
Ford read these tea leaves and plowed the bulk of its engineering might into redesigning its entire truck range first, following with cars a year later. At about the same time, Robert “Pete” Petersen, who’d just launched a magazine aimed at his dry-lakes hot-rodder pals (Hot Rod), aptly observed that America’s motoring public had no source for objective reporting on the automotive mainstream, and he stepped in to fill that need. Ford’s F-Series development team and the MotorTrend staff have each spent seven decades innovating ways to better serve their core constituencies.
In the late ’40s, most of what was written for car-buyers came from newspaper auto sections, and many authors of these sections also called on car dealers or car companies to sell the ads that ran in their section. Not surprisingly, their work was short on “criticism.” Pete and his pal Walt Woron dreamed up the name Motor Trend. As an editor, Walt sought to emulate the work of Britain’s Motor magazine. He made it MT‘s mission to report on the whole industry, rather than focusing on sports or foreign cars as our competitor Road & Track was doing. This meant delivering rigorous objective testing, reporting on future automotive technologies, covering current industry and motorsports news, and exploring the latest trends in car culture—the epicenter of which was our Southern California home.
Our early “Motor Trials” road tests involved careful stopwatch timing of acceleration, measurement of braking distances, fuel economy, and often top speed—all on public roads. (California’s rural highways lacked posted speed limits until 1960.) In the beginning, the test vehicles were borrowed from dealerships, often with a salesman chaperoning.
Ford’s spanking-new line of F-Series “Bonus Built” trucks for 1948 was available in 115 body/chassis combinations covering weight class rankings from 1/2-ton to 3-ton, badged F-1 to F-8. The roomier all-steel “million-dollar cab” featured such sybaritic refinements as an ashtray, a glove box, cowl and vent-window ventilation, a coil-sprung bench seat, and rubber isolation for the cab mounts. The base F-1 pickup truck with a 95-hp 226-cubic-inch L-head straight-six cost $1,212, or about $13,100 in 2019 money; our example’s 100-hp 239-cube flat-head V-8 added $20.
The low purchase price belies the dearth of standard equipment available on these workhorses—even the passenger-side windshield wiper cost $3 extra. Today’s cheapest rear-drive, regular-cab, short-box F-150 XL with a 3.3-liter V-6 starts at $29,750. The loaded F-150 Limited 4×4 pictured below stickers for $74,180, and a top-spec F-450 Power Stroke diesel is $95,320—obviously, the levels of standard equipment and technology are miles more advanced.
In the 1950s we instituted dynamometer testing and adopted a Tracktest fifth-wheel speedometer/distance meter to eliminate vehicle speedometer error from our test results. News and trend reportage covered the flying Helicar and Aerocar concepts (August and December 1951), the prospect of atomic-powered cars (April 1951), and the likely effect of a nuclear blast on a car (August 1953).
Car culture coverage included loads of customizing features. And we didn’t just report on racing. We raced. New York editor John Bentley finished fourth in the Watkins Glen Grand Prix in a Cunningham (January 1952), Detroit editor Don MacDonald set a class record in NASCAR’s “Flying Mile” at Daytona Beach (May 1955), and we set two speed records at Bonneville in 1959—tech editor Chuck Nerpel in a streamlined formula car, Wayne Thoms in a Borgward.
Ford spent the ’50s introducing improvements like the Ford-O-Matic transmission in 1953, tubeless tires and optional power brakes in 1955, and the first factory four-wheel-drive system in 1959. (Earlier 4x4s were converted by outside firms.) In 1953, F-100 nomenclature was introduced (possibly inspired by the F-100 Super Sabre jet fighter), and in 1958 the Super Duty name appeared on heavy-duty trucks, along with a new 534-cubic-inch V-8. For 1959 a new front bumper design arrived and remained unchanged for 20 years.
Over the next two decades, 0-60 testing by MotorTrend and others fueled the horsepower wars. We sponsored the Motor Trend 500 NASCAR road race at Riverside International Raceway from 1963 to 1971. During Eric Dahlquist’s editorship, focus shifted toward pop culture trends and leading-edge automotive tech, including tests of potential moon buggies (August 1970) and of the latest radar detectors (August 1976). Our circulation doubled in five years. Skidpad testing arrived in December of 1971, and our fifth-wheel test gear began recording to a computer in the late 1970s.
Ford introduced myriad special F-Series models. The 1961 Camper Special was optimized for slide-in pickup-bed campers; 1968’s Contractor Special and Farm and Ranch Special added toolboxes and heavier-duty suspensions; and the 1968 Trailer Special featured a trailer-brake controller, heavy-duty radiator, transmission cooler, and hitch. In 1965 Ford’s Twin I-Beam front swing-arm suspension replaced the solid axles that virtually all pickups had been using, improving ride comfort. A steady march upscale began with the fancier Ranger trim in 1965, when the four-door crew cab became available on F-250 and F-350 models. Nine years later the extended cab bowed on smaller F-Series trucks. In 1975, a new model with a 6,000-pound GVWR, conceived as a catalytic-converter dodge, was dubbed F-150. A year later Ford became America’s best-selling truck. For good.
In the ’80s and ’90s, MT instituted the 600-foot slalom maneuver (1985) and switched to the Stalker Acceleration Testing System (1995). This radar-gun-and-laptop setup sped up our tests, allowing us to measure 300 cars per year. We also started a series of special interest stories—car-versus-plane tests, top-speed shootouts, etc.—and our Of The Year programs expanded to recognize trucks (1989) and SUVs (1999). Ford’s F-Series has won our calipers six times, a number no other full-size truck has topped.
Ford took the significant safety leap of making rear anti-lock braking standard on its trucks (1987) and also went big on special editions in these decades. There were posh options like Eddie Bauer (1995) and King Ranch (1999) and performers like the mighty SVT Lightning (1993) and the NASCAR edition (1998) that celebrated Ford’s entry into the Craftsman Truck Series, which it won in 2000.
In the decades since, Ford has improved the F-Series’ capability and efficiency by introducing twin-turbo V-6 engines and 10-speed transmissions while replacing steel bodywork with “military-grade aluminum.” The desert-racing Raptor has replaced the drag-strip-optimized Lightning, and trailer reversing can be done with a knob.
Original article by Brandon Lim at MotorTrend
