Motories Publica

Solid citizens serving a motoring world for 70 years—ford F-series and motortrend

- Frank Markus

In the late 1940s Detroit had just finished winning a war. America was in an ebullient, optimistic mood. The economy was booming, suburbs were sprouting like spring weeds, and everybody was replacing cars and trucks that had largely worn out during the auto industry’s 44-month diversion to Arsenal of Democracy duty.

The folks building this new American dream needed trucks to get the job done, and when their work was done, they wanted to come home to their suburban paradise and be informed and entertained reading about their latest obsession: cars.

Ford read these tea leaves and plowed the bulk of its engineering might into redesigning its entire truck range first, following with cars a year later. At about the same time, Robert “Pete” Petersen, who’d just launched a magazine aimed at his dry-lakes hot-rodder pals (Hot Rod), aptly observed that America’s motoring public had no source for objective reporting on the automotive mainstream, and he stepped in to fill that need. Ford’s F-Series development team and the MotorTrend staff have each spent seven decades innovating ways to better serve their core constituencies.