Ford is celebrating the 80th anniversary of its Australian invention of the iconic ‘ute’, or utility or pickup truck, which led to the development of vehicles such as the F-Series and Ranger.
The Australian invention was exported to the world and copied by other automakers and now sold worldwide.
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The first integrated passenger-car based ute came after the then managing director of Ford Australia, Hubert French, received a letter from a farmer’s wife in Gippsland, Victoria, in 1933.
She wrote: “My husband and I can’t afford a car and a truck but we need a car to go to church on Sunday and a truck to take the pigs to market on Monday. Can you help?” What the customer wanted was a vehicle with passenger car comfort but could also carry loads.
French passed the letter on to a young design engineer, Lewis (Lew) Bandt, who had joined the company only a few years previously as Ford’s only designer. Bandt was only 23 years but was already showing a flair for design for which he was to become quite famous until he retired in 1975.
Bandt died in 1987 after being involved in an accident driving a restored version of the utility he helped make famous.
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By GlobalDataHis take on the passenger car-based utility was considered revolutionary at the time. Until the early 1930s, many auto manufacturers and vehicle body builders had constructed wooden or metal ‘utility’ bodies on car chassis. Henry Ford’s Model T was a particular favourite and Buckboards and Utility Runabouts were to be found on farms and delivering goods in towns and cities throughout the world.
Integrated design
Where Bandt’s design differed was that he developed his Ford utility as a coupe (two-passenger, steel-paneled, glass-windowed car) with an integrated steel-paneled load carrying section at the rear. What Bandt did was to blend the ‘pickup’ sides into a coupe body, which provided a cleaner profile and increased the load area behind the cabin.
Bandt sketched out his ute on a 10m blackboard, giving it a 545kg (1,200lb) payload on a wheelbase of 2845mm (9ft, 4in).
He completed his original design in October 1933 and quickly produced two prototypes for testing. By 23 January, 1934, he had the final drawings and the new Ford ute went into production with Bandt christening his design a ‘coupe-utility’. When the first utes came off the production line in 1934 two were sent to Ford Canada [which at the time oversaw exports to and manufacturing in the British Empire – ed. The car was also brought to the attention of Henry Ford.
Bandt’s original full-scale blueprint drawings of the 1934 coupe utility are now archived in Australia and the rebuilt version of the Bandt coupe-utility is – appropriately – housed in a museum in the rural country Victorian town of Chewton, near Melbourne.
In its day, the Ford coupe-utility had a V8 engine and three speed manual gearbox while its suspension was by transverse leaf springs with shock absorbers at the front and heavy duty semi-elliptic rear springs and shock absorbers at the rear.
The cabin was the same as the four-door Model 40 Ford five-window coupe. But, instead of the rear luggage compartment or ‘dicky seat’, Bandt added a wooden-framed utility section with steel outer panels welded to the coupe body to form a smooth-sided vehicle.
The result was quickly hailed as the ‘must have’ vehicle for the rural communities and 22,000 were sold between 1940 and 1954.
Lewis Bandt’s coupe utility was a first for Ford Australia and his ingenuity had a great impact on the then developing Australia auto industry.
The original Bandt-designed Ford ute paved the way for what has morphed into what has become some of the world’s biggest selling vehicles. Rival General Motors’ Holden was quick to copy it and it also spawned the Falcon – the first XK series was launched in 1961.
Ford Australia has now sold more than 455,000 Falcon utes.
The Australian designed and developed Ranger – built in Thailand – is also widely sold in more than 180 different countries.
Ford sold more than one million trucks globally in 2013.
