2019 Ford F-250 King Ranch is Literally a Rock Star
The 2019 Ford F-250 King Ranch was designed to work anywhere. We took it to a local quarry and gave it a bedful of road base to carry.
Ford spent years developing the current generation of its Super Duty trucks. They put thousands of hours into researching customer preferences, conducting durability testing, and hauling and towing heavy loads to make sure their rigs can get big jobs done. When Ford sent me a 2019 F-250 King Ranch with the mighty 6.7-liter Power Stroke V8 to review, I knew I couldn’t use it as a giant suburban errand machine. I had to put it to serious work. That’s what Ford made it to do. I owed it that much.
The problem was I didn’t know exactly what to do with the F-250. Whatever it turned out to be, I was going to record it for my YouTube channel, There Will Be Cars. Luckily, my dad is always working on some sort of home improvement project. He had an idea. He wanted to cover some of his yard with road base and turn that section into a sort of rough driveway. I had just the truck for the job. We both hopped into the F-250 and headed to a local quarry.
Given the fact that I was driving a $77,860 luxury truck with massaging leather seats and wood trim that didn’t belong to me, I thought it would be a good idea to keep it as neat as possible. The F-250’s 6.75-foot bed had its own liner, but my dad and I brought along a tarp to lay over that so that the crushed rock and sand wouldn’t discolor it. With the helpful guidance of a quarry employee named Adam, who used a last-generation Super Duty as his company vehicle, we got to the loading zone. A massive front-end loader dropped the road base into the F-250’s cargo box. Adam was impressed. He told me, “If that was my truck, it would be on its wheels.”
I was under the impression that we had received one ton of road base. The scale I drove over before leaving the quarry told a different story. According to its calculations, the F-250 was hauling 3,440 pounds – 40 short of my test truck’s payload rating. I could feel the added weight in the hydraulic steering and I had to plan each stop out ahead of time to make sure I didn’t plow through an intersection, but the 450-horsepower/935-lb-ft Power Stroke V8 was indifferent to what it was pulling. I might as well have been carrying home a case of bottled water from Costco.
My fun father/son experience left me with some wonderful memories of doing real-life Tonka toy stuff with the man who instilled a love of automobiles in me. Unfortunately, it also left its mark on the F-250. After my dad and I left the quarry and went to lunch, we discovered there was a crease in the top of the tailgate, right under its thick plastic liner. My best guess as to what exactly happened is that a chunk of stone fell from the front-end loader’s bucket and hit the black protective lip so hard that it transmitted a deforming amount of energy through the aluminum underneath it.
That was definitely not what I had in mind for my time with the F-250, but it was made to work hard under rough conditions. I guess I’ll just have to consider that dented tailgate an “occupational hazard.”
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