Ford's aluminum F-150 pickup truck is no lightweight - Fortune
executives will swear they were highly confident all along that shoppers — especially loyal owners of Ford F Series pickups — would rush to buy the automaker’s new aluminum-body truck. However, signs increasingly are positive that the latest generation of Ford’s single most important vehicle model, the F-150 pickup truck, is being snapped up almost as fast as it arrives at dealerships. On Friday, production began at Ford’s Kansas City assembly plant. Some analysts had warned that an aluminum-body truck poses a big risk for Ford because no automaker has ever mass-manufactured so many vehicles made from the metal at such a high rate of production, and because dealers weren’t as familiar with... Ford switched from steel to aluminum to profit from the metal’s lightness and durability. Removing 700 pounds of weight from a full-size truck allows Ford to claim the best fuel efficiency in the category. Ford’s two plants can build in the neighborhood of 700,000 pickups annually, contributing $3. 5 billion or more to the automaker’s pre-tax profit. But the cost of changeover in the U. S. , from a steel-bodied truck to the new aluminum pickup, lost production time, depressed earnings. “We’re getting tremendously positive feedback from our dealers,” said Doug Scott, Ford’s group marketing manager for. Source: fortune.com
