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America’s best-selling automobile rolls off the meeting line each 53 seconds at Ford’s Dearborn truck plant in Michigan. More than 41 million F-150s have been offered because the truck was launched 76 years in the past.
“The F collection has been the best-selling truck within the U.S. for 47 years, the best-selling automobile of any sort within the U.S. for 42 years,” says John Emmert, basic supervisor of Ford North America, Trucks.
What makes the truck so well-liked technology after technology? Vaux Adams, a metropolis worker in Sterling Heights, Michigan, says his father-in-law launched him to the Ford F-150, and Adams favored it a lot he simply leased his second one.
“I’m simply going to stay with the truck, as a result of I purchased a home, and I’ve bought to maneuver furnishings, bought to do yard work, so I wanted it,” Adams says. “I actually favored the inside and every little thing, whether or not it is from leather-based to simply the material seating. I’ve one with an enormous touchscreen, which is superb. I’m a tech man, in order that’s nice.”
Ford attributes its success to fixed innovation.
“We are at all times participating with clients, whether or not it is by market analysis or going out and observing how they use our autos or interacting with them in quite a few other ways,” Emmert says. “We take all that intelligence, and we develop autos, the F-150, to serve their wants at each attainable flip.”
The first incarnation of the Ford-150 was created in 1948. Ford was the primary to design a pickup truck for common drivers and never only for enterprise utility, in keeping with Kevin Joostema, previous president of the Washington Auto Press Association and managing president of Car-Ed, an internet site that helps customers resolve which automobile most closely fits their wants.
“The one product [Ford] appears to at all times put a few of their know-how management into is the F collection for customers, and that goes all the way in which as much as in the present day,” Joostema says. “Making very consumer-focused decisions on what they’re making an attempt to do with the lineup, making the cabs larger for passengers, altering the styling.”
Joostema says another excuse the F-150 is well-liked is as a result of Ford gives quite a lot of choices to swimsuit particular person shopper wants, together with choices like sure forms of engines or bigger cabs to suit extra passengers.
“It’s actually really onerous to consider a con, as a result of it is the broadest base,” he says. “Even the truck mattress. You may say, ‘Well, I would like an 8-foot truck mattress with the crew cab, and Ford has that. The different ones [truck makers] do not. So, as a result of it is the broadest base of choices, it is onerous to seek out the factor that it is lacking.”
At the Dearborn plant, vans are constantly constructed by 5,200 workers working 10-hour shifts. The closing phases of the method embrace the engine checks, after which there’s the physique drop, the place key items of the truck are married collectively. The course of is checked by each computer systems and staff on the ground. Humans and machines work in tandem to provide a brand new truck in underneath a minute throughout closing meeting.
“You want folks to construct autos. … If you take a look at all of the know-how that is popping out, it’s actually a couple of collaborative house,” says Corey Williams, supervisor of Ford’s Dearborn truck plant. “Every workstation has its personal laptop, and it actually assists the operator in a digital station of creating certain we guarantee high quality.”
Williams factors to elements he thinks preserve clients coming again decade after decade.
“It’s the applied sciences. It’s the inside. You’re entering into the inside, and it is like a luxurious automobile,” Williams says. “You neglect that you just’re in a truck.”
At the close by Suburban Ford of Sterling Heights, the F-150 accounts for about half of the dealership’s enterprise, in keeping with basic supervisor Jim Elder, who drives one himself.
“It matches my household’s way of life. I do not work in building, clearly, but it surely helps me transfer bicycles,” Elder says. “If I’ve to select one thing up for the home or tow one thing small or huge, it handles my on a regular basis wants.”
For folks fearful about gasoline utilization, Ford has developed the all-electric Ford F-150 Lightning.
Joostema and different reviewers do level to poor gas effectivity — restricted miles per gallon — as a draw back to proudly owning one in every of these vans. But many Americans don’t appear to thoughts, contemplating that tens of thousands and thousands of F-150s have been offered because the Nineteen Forties, together with 750,789 within the United States in 2023.