Fresh postwar design integrated the
headlamps, grille, and front fenders.
The hood is released by pulling the
bar in the upper left hood nostril.I
n 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,WORDS FRANK MARKUS
PHOTOGRAPHS BRANDON LIMTHEN AND NOW I 1949 Ford F-1 and 2019 Ford F-150 Limited
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 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.M O T O R I E S
62 MOTORTREND.COM SEPTEMBER 2019