Cutouts in F-150's side windowsills...
Cutouts in F-150's side windowsills help with tow mirrors. Ford's dash is classy; its underhood appearance isn't.
Both our F-150 and Tundra are the ne-plus-ultra mega-cab, stubby-bed type, the Ford being a SuperCrew Lariat with a 5.5-foot box tacked on (base price, $39,435), the Toyota, a CrewMax Limited trailing a similarly abbreviated bed ($42,405). And both festooned with enough software-soaked gadgetry to make them perfect fits for today's gentleman rancher. Or a family trailering horses. Like Clydesdales.
And like Clydesdales, the F-150 and Tundra are enormous beasts. Until you get acquainted with them, they seem to maneuver like two Thanksgiving Day Macy's balloons wafting down 34th Street. Which can be amusing. And periodically terrifying. Shoe-horning them down into our subterranean parking dungeon (replete with scraped overhead concrete beams and pokey, leaking water pipes) is perpetually terrifying, requiring a faith in geometry that that would impress Euclid.
Of the two, the Ford is a bit longer (by three inches), but slimmer by an inch. Yet, the Toyota's front and rear occupants enjoy an extra inch of leg stretch and 0.7 inch of front shoulder room compared with the merely gigantic Ford. To be honest, though, both truck's interiors are just silly-big; sitting behind my own 6-foot-one frame in the Tundra left me with 11 gaping inches of rear kneeroom to ponder. Enough to cross your legs...were, uh, Hollister's boot-wearing ranchers ever to dare cross their legs.
Some of the Tundra's additional interior space derives from its notably cab-forward, stubby-hood profile, a bulldog attribute that's been a turnoff among truck aficionados. But, yes, guys, there can be instances when shorter is better. Rounding a sharp, cliff-bordering single-rack corner following the Tundra, I suddenly discovered the road ahead completely hidden below the Ford hood's horizon line. Only truck-maven Mark Williams' walkie-talkie shout to "turn right!" from the Tundra's cab prevented a million-hit YouTube moment.
On the other hand, the Ford's outward vision has been improved in other directions. For instance, its front doors are now longer, moving the B-pillars beyond our peripheral vision. And the side glass adopts the F-250's drop-down cutouts, offering a better view of our F-150's optional manually extendable tow mirrors.