SOLID CITIZENS SERVING A MOTORING WORLD
FOR 70 YEARS—FORD F-SERIES AND MOTORTREND
70TH ANNIVERSARY
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 combi-
nations 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,PUBLICA
regular-cab, short-box F-150 XL with a
3.3-liter V-6 starts at $29,750. The loaded
F-150 Limited 4x4 pictured here 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 dynamom-
eter testing and adopted a Tracktest
fifth-wheel speedometer/distance meter
to eliminate vehicle speedometer error
from our test results. News and trend