2019 Ford F-450 Limited is the World’s Fanciest Tow Truck
Don’t let the F-450 Limited’s massaging seats, suede-like headliner, and wood trim fool you. It’s ready to work. And that’s what I made it do.
Have you ever faced a “good problem”? It’s when you’re at a fork in the road and both paths lead to something good, but you don’t know which one to go down. Should you take the boat out on the lake Saturday or Sunday? That’s a good problem. Wondering whether you should order steak or lobster is another one. When I knew Ford was going to loan me a 2019 F-450 Limited ($91,470 as tested) to review for a week, I had a good problem of my own. A really big one.
I wondered to myself, Should I use it to pull down a derelict skyscraper? Perhaps yank a broken earth mover out of a silver mine? Then I remembered my pal Bryan had been wanting to haul his 2000 BMW M Roadster from his place near Dallas to his mom’s house in Austin, Texas.
The tires on it had aged out so he didn’t want to make the roughly three-hour journey on them. I had to be up in his neck of the woods (Frisco) to cover a Shelby Mustang event so I floated the idea of using the F-450 to take his car back to Austin and shooting the experience for my YouTube channel, There Will Be Cars. He gladly agreed to it. Good problem solved. Kind of.
Getting the right hitch/adapter sleeve took a lot longer than expected. By the time we headed south, it was well after 9 p.m.
Once we were going, I was able to relax a little and enjoy the fact that my test truck had ventilated and massaging front seats and occasionally take a quick glance at the stars above through the panels of the full-length Vista Roof. But I didn’t forget that I had a 2,100-pound trailer and my buddy’s 3,100-pound sports car behind me. Altogether, I was moving close to 14,000 pounds down the interstate at 70 mph.
The F-450 seemed oblivious to the weight attached to it. Thanks to its 6.7-liter Power Stroke V8 diesel, it was able to carry more than 5,000 pounds of payload, gooseneck-pull 32,500 pounds, and conventionally tow 21,000 pounds. A trailer and a small German roadster were just paper anchors to the F-450.
Pulling that much weight at night certainly made me a little more anxious, but, in a couple of ways, it helped me enjoy the F-450 more. The Bimmer/trailer combo added useful heft to the steering and improved the F-450’s off-roading-over-chunks-of-broken-statues ride quality.
I think it’ll be a long time before another F-450 (or even an F-350 dually) enters my local press fleet. When it does, I’ll be sure to get my hands on it, then come up with a fun and creative way to solve another “good problem.”
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