2017 FORD SUPER DUTY
Ford owns the world of heavy duty trucks
With the Super
Duty, Ford brings its technological know-how to a new generation of trucks.
In the intensely competitive world of automotive technology, where millions of dollars and thousands of manhours are expended to gain even the thinnest of advantages, rarely has one company pulled as far ahead from the pack as Ford did this year with the latest generation of heavy-duty pickups.
what it learned when it converted its factories to build the lighter duty F-150 pickups with military-grade aluminum bodies, Ford conceived and crafted a 2017 F Series Heavy Duty line that literally runs laps around the competition. If you're in the market for something that can haul 10-horse trailers or frontend loaders, or get a crew with tools and equipment to a work site, let me save you some time: Just go to the nearest Ford dealer and make your best deal.
I don't say that lightly. These are big purchases. A half-ton, three-quarter or one-ton pickup starts around $32,000 and can easily more than double with nice-to-have options. For the most part, these are business investments. They must carry their own weight, and buyers are wise to shop wisely and bargain hard. At the moment, Ram and General Motors are offering some steep price incentives. They should. Ford just raised the bar for the entire segment. Whatever one's key metric—safety, technology, towing and hauling capability, ease of use, flexibility—Ford has it right. This truck is a testament to the brilliance of American automotive engineering.
ONE WORD: TOUGH
Aluminum body panels and box allowed Ford to trim nearly 800 pounds from its heavy-duty trucks, and more than half of that went right back into a high-strength steel frame, meaning substantially larger rails and cross members to increase chassis strength by 24 times over the previous frame.
That is integrated with a more finely tuned suspension to give the truck a more solid feel than its predecessor and the competition.
Ford's advantage widens thanks to its patented adaptive steering technology, one of several innovations nowhere to be found on competitors. The system calculates driver input and vehicle speed and increases or decreases the steering gear ratio by up to 30 percent to provide optimal response for different conditions. The result is improved driving comfort on the highway, especially when towing, and better maneuverability in crowded parking lots.
A number of independent testers are reporting that the new Ford Super Duties leave the competition in the dust on the highway, on hill climbs, trailer hauling tests and off-road courses.
As Motor Trend’s Scott Evans put it when explaining why the big Fords took the 2017 Truck of the Year Award, “… we knew by the halfway point which truck would win.”
TECHNOLOGY LEADER
Adaptive steering is just one reason why so
many big Fords seem to be centered in their allocated spaces at the grocery store. Another is a sophisticated, seven-camera system that allows the driver to see a 360-view of the truck, and lets the truck see around corners
A tri-panel display in an 8-inch screen synthesizes the feed from one-megapixel cameras to show whether an obstacle is coming from either side or straight on. Split view is activated at the touch of a button and automatically shuts off when vehicle speed reaches 6.2 mph.
There's a back-up camera and even a slot for a camera on the rear of a trailer. A rear camera that can be zoomed makes lining up a trailer hitch a breeze. Also helpful is the optional trailer reverse guidance. Simply turn a knob on the dash in the direction that you want the trailer to go, and the truck figures out the rest.
My backing skills are, at best, rusty, a term which falsely impugns that I ever had any. Still, I was able to whip a fourhorse trailer around a curved drive and straight into a parking spot. On the first try. Others of my fellow scribes had the opportunity to experience the system's jackknife warnings.
Sales of the new Super Duty pickups are up sharply, helping Ford zoom to a 40 percent market share in March, and Ford says many HD buyers are opting for the trailer reverse system and a suite of safety technologies. That includes adaptive cruise control with front collision mitigation, lane-keeping alerts and blind-spot monitoring, which employs radar sensors in the rear tail lamps to increase awareness of obstacles and traffic.
People who buy heavy-duty trucks for personal use tend to want the best, and Ford did its homework on this one. Nice touches abound: a dash-mounted tailgate release for attaching a gooseneck, four 25-amp and two 40-amp auxiliary switches, mounted overhead, ready to handle power takeoffs for winches, light bars, beer coolers. That's in addition to an available 400watt inverter and two 110-volt power outlets for charging tools and electronics.
A BEAST WITH LONG LEGS
The new Fords lead the pack in towing and hauling. The optional 6.7-liter Power Stroke® turbo diesel V8 produces best-in-class 925 lb.-ft. of torque and 440 horsepower. Torque is the number that matters here, and Ford's is 15 lb.ft more than GM's latest Duramax Diesels. Dodge's 6.4-L Cummins turbodiesel is rated at 800 torque.
Super Duty delivers maximum gooseneck towing of 32,500 pounds for F-450, class-leading 27,500-pound fifth-wheel towing and class-leading conventional towing of 21,000 pounds; maximum payload rated at up to a best-in-class 7,630 pounds.
A couple of gas engines are also available. Standard is a 6.2-L V8; chassis cab buyers get a 6.8-L V10. Sixspeed TorqShift automatic transmissions are standard.
Manufacturers are not required to submit heavy-duty trucks for EPA testing, but independent researchers have consistently found the new Fords to be more fuel efficient. Motor Trend compared an F-350 diesel-powered dually to a similar Ram 3500. The Ford averaged a combined 18.0 to the Ram's 14.8. That's more than 20 percent.
On top of that, Ford offers a 48-gallon fuel tank on long-box Crew Cab configuration for both gasoline and diesel trucks. That works out to more than 850 miles of range, which explains a mystery.
I put a ton of miles on our tester, moving furniture, sod, dirt, whatever. At the end of the week, the truck had less than half a tank of fuel, but said it still had more than 400 miles of range remaining. I thought either the fuel gauge or trip computer had gone whacky. Turns out it was me.
Bottom line: You can save some money buying a different heavy-duty truck, but you'll wind up wishing you hadn't.