WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — One early summer weekend not long ago, near my home in the Berkshires, I got the fishing itch. I loaded up the King Ranch F-150 pickup and headed to the hills for an afternoon of fishing at a local pond known (well, mostly suspected) to be filled with largemouth bass and bluegills. My daughter Brooke brought her four-year-old half-brother Cayman and her Labrador retriever Lila.
It’s not long before you realize why Ford's F-150 dominates the truck market. The best-selling truck in the United States for 24 years and the best-selling vehicle in the U.S. for 12 years, the F-150 leads the pack, with increasingly tough competition year after year from Chevy, GMC and Dodge, not to mention a capable Japanese truck called Tundra.
This year, like every other, the Blue Oval offers an almost staggering number of choices for the 2002 F-150 shopper, a wider variety of trim levels, bed lengths, interiors and drivetrains than ever before. But maybe this year’s most notable and most enjoyable version is the one created by Ford and the saddle makers at Texas’s historic King Ranch, to create the King Ranch SuperCrew, a limousine of a pickup truck if there ever were one.
Wide open spaces
Based on the fairly new F-150 SuperCrew, the industry's first under-8500-pound GVW full-size pickup truck, with four full-size doors and a full rear passenger compartment, the King Ranch F-150 SuperCrew is aimed at the more affluent truck buyer who wants the toughness of a pickup married to the luxury of a high-end sedan. The King Ranch SuperCab version also comes to market in 2002, with fewer options and a smaller cabin.
The King Ranch SuperCrew cab, like all SuperCrews, is 12 inches longer than the F-150 SuperCab, and boasts best-in-class rear-seat roominess and four doors for easy entry and exit. General exterior styling remains the same as with the 2001 model, though the King Ranch version features several exclusive paint treatments. Unique two-tone paint has a raised cutline in colors of Estate Green with Arizona Beige two-tone; Chestnut with Arizona Beige two-tone and Charcoal Blue with Arizona Beige two-tone. Fender badging and 17-inch, 10-spoke painted aluminum wheels are distinguishing touches.
