Hasta La Ideas

I live above a plumbing supply store, so I know what plumbers drive: Trucks and vans. But the other day I ran into a plumber (a fiftyish Master Plumber who owns his own business) whom I hired for a job a few years ago, and he was driving his personal car—a spanking white BMW 850i. Not too shabby.

That tradesmen who earn a good living buy luxury sedans doesn’t surprise me; if you spent most of your youth driving a pickup, it makes sense to want to get yourself into a sled with some bling. What does surprise me is the rise of luxury pickup trucks. Because pickup trucks used to be for, well, picking stuff up, like sofas and boilers and the crew of guys that was going to help you build a client’s deck.

But in recent years manufacturers have been steadily making trucks more deluxe, adding fittings that run counter to their original utilitarian purposes. Since gas prices have been relatively low in recent years, consumers have been snapping them up. And now Ford is upping the ante with their venerable F-150.

In a press release from this morning, Ford announced that their “New Top-of-the-Line Ford F-150 Limited Is Most Advanced, Luxurious F-150 Ever.” 

The seats are covered in Mojave leather, the VIN number is laser-etched onto a plaque embedded in the center armrest/console lid, the power front seats have built-in massage units. There are moonroofs for both the front and rear-seat passengers. The interior trim features “fiddleback eucalyptus wood,” i.e. eucalyptus with the curly-figured appearance you’d see on the back of a violin.

Prices haven’t been released, but the Detroit Free Press estimates the Limited will “easily top $60,000.” Autoblog points out that the truck features “the luxury modifiers we expect from Europeans.” Reuters spells out the logic in producing such a truck, pointing out that last month “half of the new F-150 pickup trucks sold by Ford were of its three existing premium models.”

So yeah, it looks like this unexpected direction for pickup trucks is turning out to be a lucrative one for the manufacturers. “The new F-150 Limited,” writes Ford, “meets the growing, untapped needs of luxury customers looking for exclusivity, convenience and fine craftsmanship that’s differentiated from other high-series trucks.”

Let’s cut through the marketing-speak: Do you guys think these trucks are aimed at tradesmen that have done well and can’t kick the truck habit, or white-collar folk who want the blue-collar image?