This kind of testing and documentation takes plenty of time and money, and coordinating all this is no doubt a dirty job, but someone has to do it. Thankfully, Ford has no-nonsense truck guy Mike Rowe keeping Erick Kuehn, chief engineer for the F-150, and Marc Lapine, the Ford Truck marketing manager, in line.
We were at some of the testing and the filming of a head-to-head torque race where the Ford guys took on their two main rivals. Although we can't give anything away, we can say Ford did everything possible to keep it a fair fight, even though on the face of it, a V-8 vs. V-6 contest doesn't look fair.
That particular episode won't debut for several weeks, but the next installment will happen pretty quickly. Specifically, the Red EcoBoost F-150 was called into duty at the Nygaard Logging Company, used as a skidder to haul harvested timber to a large logging truck. Each log can weight up to four tons and is much too large to be carried. The logs are wrapped with specially designed chains, attached to the F-150 hitch, and dragged more than a mile to the loading areas. In total, the F-150 hauled almost 200,000 pounds of fresh-cut wood for Nygaard before calling it a day.
Our guess is Ford will be pushing these messages in a lot of places to convince half-ton truck guys this engine is a viable choice. And if early indications continue to pan out, that might not be such a hard sell. It would also make sense to plant the EcoBoost engine in the medium and large SUVs, like the Expeditions and Navigators, in order to spread development costs for the engine. It may be a dirty job to try to sell smaller engines to a V-8-loving truck segment, but with more fuel economy regulations on the horizon, somebody's got to do it.