Ford's Epic Gamble: The inside story - Fortune
The Baja 1,000 is considered one of the world’s most grueling off-road races, and the engineers at Ford figured the 2013 running was just what they needed to shake down their new, aluminum F-series pickup truck. Ford assembled a small army of 63 people, including two doctors and two EMTs. Fearing that competitors would get an advance peek at the design of the 2015-model truck, they built a new truck with aluminum body panels that looked exactly like an old one. Last year’s race loop was one of the toughest in years, taking contestants over 882 miles of rocky desert tracks, dicey mountain passes, and the occasional paved road around Mexico’s Baja Peninsula. Of some 300 entrants, nearly half failed to finish—among them several specially built race trucks. After the race the truck was driven back to Dearborn, Mich. That’s a lot of effort to put in for a lowly pickup, a vehicle that spends most of its days on construction sites and farms and lacks the sex appeal of a Mustang or even a Fusion. While a lot of attention has focused on outgoing CEO Alan Mulally’s One Ford plan to unify the global manufacturer, the automaker’s profits largely depend on a beefy truck that is sold only in North America and will never find a market in Asia or... Not that it needs to. The F-series has outsold every other car and truck in the U. S. for more than three decades, a record of longevity that ranks in the hierarchy of superbrands like Coke and Marlboro. Source: fortune.com
