Driving the 2015 Ford F-150: "The Biggest Loser" comes to pickups

Somewhere in the Six Flags Fiesta Texas parking lot outside San Antonio, while trying to whip a 2015 Ford F-150 around a makeshift autocross course and in the process flinging more cones than a Dairy Queen in an earthquake, I had a thought:

It would be wrong to call this new rig the pickup Barack Obama built — but not that wrong.

Before you spew hot fire in the comments, hear me out. By 2008, Ford engineers had begun to plan this redesign of the F-150, a vehicle that’s 20 percent of its sales volume and a larger percent of profits. The idea of saving weight by switching to an aluminum body quickly came up, but Ford needed several months of research — with suppliers, with aluminum producers and its own engineers — to ensure it could make the change, keeping a plan for a more conventional steel body proceeding along at the same time.

Toward the end of 2009, Ford decided an aluminum F-150 was possible. By then, another change had come along: Obama’s election, and his administration’s decision to require sharply higher fuel efficiency from cars and trucks sold in the United States by 2025.

New fuel economy rules were “part of the equation, but the impetus for looking at aluminum was how do we take the truck to the next level,” says Joe Hinrichs, Ford’s North American chief and the head of global manufacturing when Ford chose to switch to aluminum. The question, Hinrichs added, was always “what can we do to make the truck significantly more capable.”

Which is how I came to the Six Flags lot, part of a rolling tour Ford set up to demonstrate to journalists, dealers and ultimately its most loyal customers just how different the new F-150 is from all that’s come before.

What does aluminum do for you in a pickup? The answer comes from basic physics: for the same strength frame and body, a lighter truck has more capacity for hauling than a heavier one. By shaving some 700 lbs. across its lineup, Ford can now offer a substantially larger payload and more towing capacity at every size of F-150, with less gas burned in everyday use.

The first trick will be assuaging potential customers that the F-150’s new aluminum beds and bodies are far stronger than a Bud Light can. Ford likes to focus on how it’s using “military-grade” aluminum, which is true, although that’s just a grade of thickness. There’s no way to tell on looks alone that the truck has an aluminum body — the panels are just as stiff — unless you try to stick a magnet on.

But the benefits of losing those 700 lbs. were unmistakable from the wheel. At that Six Flags lot, Ford sent writers out through an autocross loop in the F-150 and its competitors, an exercise that felt like a square dance class with sumo wrestlers. Yet the Ford felt noticeably limber and more controllable than the Chevy Silverado and Ram 1500. In a brief towing loop, a 3.5-liter EcoBoost V-6 with 365 hp and 420 lb-ft of torque growled while yoked to 10,000 lbs. of pig iron, but accelerated more than briskly enough to merge with 60-mph traffic. That wasn’t true about a Hemi-powered Ram 1500 — even though its trailer held 1,000 lbs. less, and it has 10 hp more than the Ecoboost, it had to use all available power for a similar merge, and had little in reserve on hills at highway speed. The Ram Hemi can haul 1,710 lbs. of payload; thanks to the aluminum body, the 3.5 Ecoboost can carry up to 3,180 lbs., or 86 percent more.

But after all this buildup, I don’t think the body metal swap will be the hardest sell for Ford. That laurel belongs to the newest engine in the lineup: a 2.7-liter twin-turbo direct-injected V-6, with 325 hp and 375 lb.-ft. of torque — a power-per-liter ratio that was once the realm of Ferrari engines. For the past four decades, full-size trucks have been sold with the mantra “there’s no replacement for displacement,” but Ford now wants to sell you an engine that’s half the size of those it once made standard.

The launch of the 3.5-liter Ecoboost V-6 in 2009 wasn’t quite so fraught, because it was seen as an efficient compliment to the two V-8s in the line at the time; as it turned out, more truck buyers than expected — up to half of Ford’s F-150 retail customers at one point — preferred it. Offering an engine smaller than 3 liters in service of such daily weightlifting sounds like a time bomb of turbo bits waiting to explode from cardiac arrest.

Yet this isn’t a normal V-6. Instead of an all-aluminum engine block like most modern engines, Ford designed a unique two-piece block from compact-graphite iron — a type of metal found in diesels and NASCAR V-8s — with an aluminum base. The result, Ford contends, is a smaller mill that has both the power and durability of a V-8, but far lower fuel consumption.