A significant event has heralded the imminent arrival of Ford’s groundbreaking, aluminum-bodied 2015 F-150 pickup at dealerships: The truck’s on-line configurator is reside. That indicates you can now go to Ford’s web site and begin mixing and matching cabs, bed lengths, engines, and drive configurations. Most important, you can do all of this and see how considerably all that configuring will expense you. Getting fans of trucks ourselves—we might be called Auto and Driver, but how else are we gonna get our track automobiles to the racetrack? Or carry 650 pounds of anything?—we instantly began fixing up the 2015 Ford F-150 of our aluminum-laced dreams.
MODEL:
Ford F-150 XLT SuperCrew 4×4 3.5L EcoBoost (base price: $ 42,615)
Let’s get this out of the way up front, people: Complete-size pickup trucks are anything but low-cost these days. Positive, the F-150′s $ 26,615 base price sounds good (full lineup pricing right here), but that buys you a regular-cab XL model with vinyl flooring, steel wheels, and black-plastic every thing. (It does look sweet, although.) When you genuinely start off ticking the boxes for stuff wanted by men and women not becoming paid to drive a pickup, nicely, factors get out of hand quite speedily. Which brings us to our F-150. Ford gives 5 trim levels—XL, XLT, Lariat, King Ranch, and Platinum—that span from the aforementioned work truck to leather-lined luxury rigs. Whilst we’d entirely dig a King Ranch or a Platinum, we decided to stay somewhat sensible and grab the nicest midrange F-150, the XLT.
Offered that several C/D staffers have kids, and as a result a require for a correct back seat, we went ahead and made our XLT a 4-door SuperCrew model. Specifying the short, 5.5-foot bed keeps the F-150 slightly city-friendly, and 4-wheel drive guarantees we’re prepared for winter and unpaved roads. Right off the bat, selecting the SuperCrew physique style calls for buyers to step up from the base 3.5-liter V-6 (the transmission remains a 6-speed automatic). We skipped over the F-150′s new 2.7-liter twin-turbocharged EcoBoost V-6 engine and went for the tried-and-true 3.5-liter EcoBoost V-6, since the outgoing—and surely heavier—truck with that engine was fairly sprightly. 4-wheel drive adds a pretty penny, too, at $ 3495. All of this adds up to a base value for an un-optioned XLT SuperCrew 4×4 of $ 41,415.
For that sum, Ford swaps the base XL’s black-plastic bumpers and grille and such for chrome pieces, tosses in some aluminum 17-inch wheels, power windows, power door and tailgate locks, fog lights, SYNC voice-recognition, cruise handle, full carpeting, map lights, and much more.
Possibilities:
Magnetic gray paint ($ )
302A Equipment Group ($ 3245 after $ 2000 package discount)
Navigation ($ 795)
Trailer tow package ($ 495)
Spray-in bedliner ($ 475)
Ford’s F-150 pricing, as large and in charge as it may be, is hardly outside of the complete-size-pickup norm. GM and Ram are both guilty of equivalent sins (our lately departed lengthy-term 2013 Ram 1500, a midlevel SLT model with the base V-6, rang in with an as-tested price tag of $ 47,050), but even still, the XLT’s proud base value left us disinterested in driving the final tally a lot larger. After choosing the F-150′s color—we went with the wonderfully ironic Magnetic gray colour, primarily because the truck’s aluminum physique isn’t magnetic—we checked just 4 for-price choice boxes.
The initial was for a spray-in bedliner ($ 475), followed by navigation for $ 795 and a towing package for $ 495. The privilege of in-vehicle mapping required we initial select a single of 2 gigantic alternative groups, the sexily named 301A or 302A packages. Opting for 301A brings F-150 buyers heated side mirrors, a backup camera, power-adjustable pedals, an 8-way energy driver’s seat, rear under-seat storage, a leather-wrapped steering wheel, SiriusXM satellite radio, and a Class IV trailer hitch. We decided to upgrade 1 step further to the 302A kit, which gets every little thing from 301A plus remote engine beginning, parking sensors, 18-inch chrome wheels, LED box lighting, 10-way energy driver and passenger seats, a 110-volt energy outlet, heated front seats, a energy sliding rear window, and Ford’s MyFord Touch infotainment show.
In Ford’s bizarre alternatives structure, massive packages like 302A bring a built-in “discount” for ordering them. Essentially, as an alternative of giving the bundle a single price tag that’s slightly reduce than the cumulative value of its contents, Ford seemingly slaps the complete value of all the content onto the package. Upon ordering the package, the purchaser is then presented with an desirable discount off of that total. In the case of the 302A package, purchasers face down a steep $ 5245 price tag just before a $ 2000 discount knocks that sum down to $ 3245. It is silly, but combined with our selection restraint, it outcomes in our truck’s general MSRP staying relatively low, at $ 47,625.
Definitely, that is a ton of dough for a truck that still rocks cloth seats (leather is not even available on the XLT), but for a properly-equipped workhorse that can tackle suburban sprawl as well as it can handle a week’s worth of camping gear in the bed and a totally loaded trailer at the exact same time, take into account it a value in today’s truck industry. And preserve in mind, the F-150 must be drastically lighter than its competition thanks to its aluminum body—which Ford doesn’t appear to be charging its consumers further for—and as a result should consume less fuel and perhaps even manage much better. Let’s just say we can not wait to drive it and see if the latter is correct.
How We’d Spec It: The Oh-So-Aluminum 2015 Ford F-150 Pickup
