All-New King Ranch Wows the Lone Star State
Pickups, hard work, and rock-and-roll go well together. After you get in your truck at the end of a long day of busting your ass at the office or job site, you just want to crank up some Zeppelin, hang your left arm out the window and cruise.
Ford seems to be keenly aware of the harmony between those three things. At the recent State Fair of Texas Auto Media Day, Ford Truck Group Marketing Manager Doug Scott introduced three trucks as music clips spiked with electric guitar played in the background. The first that rolled out under the bright blue morning sky of the Lone Star State was the 2015 F-450 Platinum. The second was the 5,000,000th Super Duty – a milestone which the automaker was approximately two weeks away from reaching, Scott said.
The last vehicle driven into the presentation area was a 2015 F-150 King Ranch. Out of it stepped a man who knows what it means to work hard: John Marrinan, a Montana cattle rancher. He beat out roughly 15,000 people who submitted their personal torture test formats for the rig to become one of only four participants to evaluate the new truck’s durability in his own unique way. Ford lent him its upcoming aluminum light-duty pickup to use in hauling giant bales of hay from the field to his livestock – the kind of job which is usually performed with three-quarter- or one-ton pickups.
Marrinan’s tester had the 365-horsepower 3.5-liter EcoBoost engine; that was tasked with a six-percent grade at times and the job of pulling trailers loaded with six to eight 1,500-pound cylinders of cow food. You can learn more about his experience in this video.
Of course, Ford’s performed plenty of its own shaking down of the 2015 F-150. By the time it officially launches, the truck will have been tested over the course of 10 million miles, a record for the F-Series by a margin of two million miles, Scott said.
Had Marrinan been loaned an F-150 with the base, naturally aspirated 3.5-liter V6, he would have been able to tow 7,600 pounds – a 900-pound improvement compared to the outgoing 3.7-liter unit’s capabilities, according to Chief Engineer Pete Reyes. The new truck’s lighter weight and better power-to-weight ratio allows you to get the entry-level six in the crew cab body style with four-wheel drive.
Reyes went on to list several of the features on the F-150, such as its 360-degree camera set-up and the Blind Spot Information System with Cross Traffic Alert. Marrinan got behind the wheel to demonstrate the effectiveness of the active park assist feature by working with it to neatly parallel park the F-150 in between the two Super Duty trucks near it. The system did the steering for him.
Ultimately, that last convenience was lost on Marrinan. Reyes asked him how many times he parallel parks on his 30,000 acres of land and he said, “Zero. Cows do not care.”
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