Ford on Thursday began shipping its best-selling F-series pickup trucks for the new model year from the second of two assembly plants as it ramps up to full production, the company told Reuters.
Four new engines will be introduced in the F-series pickups for 2011. The base F-150 with 3.7-litre V6, is seen as a key to the automaker’s effort to raise fuel economy ratings across its lineup because of its high sales volume.
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Ford also began shipping five- and 6.2-litre V8 pickup trucks from both of its F-series truck plants on Thursday, the news agency reported.
Production of the much-anticipated 3.5-litre, turbo-charged Ecoboost F-150 pickup will begin in early 2011. It is expected to use far less fuel and still have more power than the larger V8 engine it replaces. But some dealers have told the news agency it will take some convincing for full-sized pickup truck buyers to accept six-cylinder trucks.
Federal fuel economy ratings for the turbo-charged truck have not yet been established.
Ford’s 2010 F-series pickup trucks are on pace to finish the year as the best-selling vehicle in the US market for the 34th consecutive year, George Pipas, Ford sales analyst, told Reuters.
It expects that four new engines in its 2011 models will help it increase its sales lead over General Motors’ Chevrolet and GMC lines, led by the Chevy Silverado.
In October, F-Series light-duty pickups were briefly eclipsed in sales by GM’s pickups. In November, the F-series was back on top.
Pipas said that the F-series this month will top 500,000 in sales for the year. That would be up from 413,625 in 2009.
Pickup trucks sales are down sharply from earlier this decade, when F-series trucks reached a peak of 939,511 in 2004, Pipas said. But so were total auto sales, which are expected to end 2010 near 11.5m vehicles, compared with about 17m in 2004.
The shipments that began last week from Ford’s main truck plant in Dearborn, Michigan, also began to clear out holding parking lots at the abandoned Wixom, Michigan plant. A few thousand trucks were held in company lots around Detroit after production in Dearborn.
About two-thirds of F-series pickups are made at Dearborn and the rest at Kansas City, Missouri. The Dearborn plant and the holding lots near Detroit began shipping to dealers mainly by rail last week, and the Kansas City plant began shipping on Thursday, Ford told Reuters.
