A major event has heralded the imminent arrival of Ford's groundbreaking, aluminum-bodied 2015 F-150 pickup at dealerships: The truck's online configurator is live. That means you can now go to Ford's website and start mixing and matching cabs, bed lengths, engines, and drive configurations. Most important, you can do all of this and see how much all that configuring will cost you. Being fans of trucks ourselves—we may be called Car and Driver, but how else are we gonna get our track cars to the racetrack? Or carry 650 pounds of anything?—we immediately started fixing up the 2015 Ford F-150 of our aluminum-laced dreams.
MODEL:
Ford F-150 XLT SuperCrew 4×4 3.5L EcoBoost (base price: $42,615)
Let's get this out of the way up front, folks: Full-size pickup trucks are anything but cheap these days. Sure, the F-150′s $26,615 base price sounds nice (full lineup pricing here), but that buys you a regular-cab XL model with vinyl flooring, steel wheels, and black-plastic everything. (It does look sweet, though.) When you really start ticking the boxes for stuff wanted by people not being paid to drive a pickup, well, things get out of hand pretty quickly. Which brings us to our F-150. Ford offers five trim levels—XL, XLT, Lariat, King Ranch, and Platinum—that span from the aforementioned work truck to leather-lined luxury rigs. While we'd totally dig a King Ranch or a Platinum, we decided to stay somewhat sensible and grab the nicest midrange F-150, the XLT.
Given that many C/D staffers have kids, and thus a need for a proper back seat, we went ahead and made our XLT a four-door SuperCrew model. Specifying the short, 5.5-foot bed keeps the F-150 slightly city-friendly, and four-wheel drive ensures we're ready for winter and unpaved roads. Right off the bat, selecting the SuperCrew body style requires buyers to step up from the base 3.5-liter V-6 (the transmission remains a six-speed automatic). We skipped over the F-150′s new 2.7-liter twin-turbocharged EcoBoost V-6 engine and went for the tried-and-true 3.5-liter EcoBoost V-6, because the outgoing—and surely heavier—truck with that engine was pretty sprightly. Four-wheel drive adds a pretty penny, too, at $3495. All of this adds up to a base price for an un-optioned XLT SuperCrew 4×4 of $41,415.
For that sum, Ford swaps the base XL's black-plastic bumpers and grille and such for chrome pieces, tosses in some aluminum 17-inch wheels, power windows, power door and tailgate locks, fog lights, SYNC voice-recognition, cruise control, full carpeting, map lights, and more.
OPTIONS:
Magnetic gray paint ($0)
302A Equipment Group ($3245 after $2000 package discount)
Navigation ($795)
Trailer tow package ($495)
Spray-in bedliner ($475)
Ford's F-150 pricing, as large and in charge as it may be, is hardly outside of the full-size-pickup norm. GM and Ram are both guilty of similar sins (our recently departed long-term 2013 Ram 1500, a midlevel SLT model with the base V-6, rang in with an as-tested price of $47,050), but even still, the XLT's proud base price left us disinterested in driving the final tally much higher. After picking the F-150′s color—we went with the wonderfully ironic Magnetic gray color, mainly because the truck's aluminum body isn't magnetic—we checked just four for-cost option boxes.
The first was for a spray-in bedliner ($475), followed by navigation for $795 and a towing package for $495. The privilege of in-car mapping required we first select one of two gigantic option groups, the sexily named 301A or 302A packages. Opting for 301A brings F-150 buyers heated side mirrors, a backup camera, power-adjustable pedals, an eight-way power driver's seat, rear under-seat storage, a leather-wrapped steering wheel, SiriusXM satellite radio, and a Class IV trailer hitch. We decided to upgrade one step further to the 302A kit, which gets everything from 301A plus remote engine starting, parking sensors, 18-inch chrome wheels, LED box lighting, 10-way power driver and passenger seats, a 110-volt power outlet, heated front seats, a power sliding rear window, and Ford's MyFord Touch infotainment display.
In Ford's bizarre options structure, big packages like 302A bring a built-in "discount" for ordering them. Essentially, instead of giving the bundle one price that's slightly lower than the cumulative value of its contents, Ford seemingly slaps the full value of all the content onto the package. Upon ordering the package, the buyer is then presented with an attractive discount off of that total. In the case of the 302A package, buyers face down a steep $5245 price tag before a $2000 discount knocks that sum down to $3245. It's silly, but combined with our option restraint, it results in our truck's overall MSRP staying relatively low, at $47,625.
- 2015 Ford F-150 Revealed: Competitors Can't Hold a Magnet to It
- Feature: 10 Things You Didn't Know About the 2015 Ford F-150
- Ford F-150 Research: Full Pricing, Specs, Photos, and More!
Certainly, that's a ton of dough for a truck that still rocks cloth seats (leather isn't even available on the XLT), but for a well-equipped workhorse that can tackle suburban sprawl as well as it can handle a week's worth of camping gear in the bed and a fully loaded trailer at the same time, consider it a value in today's truck market. And keep in mind, the F-150 should be significantly lighter than its competition thanks to its aluminum body—which Ford doesn't appear to be charging its customers extra for—and thus should consume less fuel and maybe even handle better. Let's just say we can't wait to drive it and see if the latter is true.
from Car and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/nSHy27
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