Top-selling Ford F-150 is ‘backbone of America’
DETROIT — The wildly popular Ford F-150 pickup truck with its family of Super Duty siblings is second only to the iPhone when it comes to branded consumer product sales, according to a new economic analysis from the Boston Consulting Group.
While the iPhone generated $55 billion in revenue to $42 billion for the F-Series in 2019, the F-Series actually generated more in revenue than the National Football League, Major League Baseball, National Basketball Association and National Hockey League combined — which was just $40 billion, the analysis showed.
Ford debuted its redesigned F-150 Thursday.
All by itself, the F-Series full-size pickup truck franchise within Ford Motor Company is so big that it would make the list of Fortune 100 companies.
“It is impossible to overstate the economic significance of the Ford F-150 to Ford and to the U.S. economy,” said market analyst Jon Gabrielsen.
“The Ford F-150 is the single highest-volume vehicle sold in the U.S. and has been for years.”
The F-Series would actually be the 80th largest company in the U.S. in terms of revenue, Ford proudly notes. Bigger than Nike, Coca-Cola, Starbuck’s, Tesla, MasterCard, Netflix, VISA, Uber, CapitalOne, Twitter, Disneyworld and Southwest Airlines.
“I’m honoured to work on the F-150. It’s the backbone of America,” said mechanical engineer Jackie Dimarco, director of Ford truck strategy.
The bestselling F-150 and its F-Series siblings are Ford’s most valuable franchise and they’re more important now than ever, because the company has forecast a $5-billion loss in second quarter after a two-month industry shutdown related to the coronavirus. The F-150 is sometimes called the “golden goose” by analysts, and they say Ford’s financial health depends on the F-Series.
Recent U.S. sales of the F-Series reflect America’s passion for pickups: • 909,330 in 2018 • 896,526 in 2019 • 186,562 in first quarter of 2020
The Ford F-150 was the most considered pickup truck among shoppers by a wide margin during the first three months of this year, according to Kelley Blue Book.
“If one looked at a bar graph showing sales of every vehicle ever conceived and sold by mankind, that bar graph looks roughly like a side profile of a lawn with a dandelion in it, That dandelion is the FSeries,” said Eric Noble, president of The CarLab, a car design consultancy based in Orange County, California.
“If you think about it, this thing sells half a million to a million units a year and basically has been killing it for 100 years,” he said. “People argue about how long the F-Series has been the sales leader. Farmers all over America just took the beds from their wagons and put them on the back of Model Ts. Ford was the first manufacturer to make pickup trucks in an assembly plant.”