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Snow Then Sand in a New F-150, Part 1

Rambling around So Cal in a new Ford truck

Some of the best stuff happens on unplanned adventures. Ray called. "Dude, let's go riding this week." He was thinking Snow Summit—in the Big Bear area above San Bernardino. Good snow this year. Not a bad idea. Weekday riding is the cat's meow when it comes to dodging traffic in L.A.'s commuter nightmare, too. Multi-Bonus.

Usually we take my Subaru on runs like this, but I had an option Ray didn't know about, and ulterior motive to boot. "Dude, I've got a new F-150 four-by this week. This is perfect. We'll get in some time on the hill and I can shoot the truck on the way up." (If you wait until the return trip to take your beauty shots, it's not uncommon to run out of light. Damned planetary rotation.)

From the Hip

The coordination of this last-minute sort of action is easiest when you shoot from the hip. Avoid concerning yourself with the stupid little stuff that the Die Easy crowd lets derail an otherwise groovy idea. Ray lives in L.A. I live in San Diego. There's a Ford dealership in San B that Ray deals with, and the sales types there let him dock his parts truck in their back lot. I stayed on the 15 instead of shortcutting via the 215, and pick Ray up a minute off the highway. It costs only a few minutes, typically, but with the nasty weather I found heading north that day, it added an hour to the drive. (Next time you're meeting me somewhere more convenient, Dude.).

I'd been wanting for a place to shoot this truck. Feature edit is more fun with a spin on it. Makes you want to read the stuff because it's not just an amorphous analysis with a few numbers sprinkled on it for flavor, but about doing things and how the vehicle handles itself. I wanted to do some boarding, and the ride up to Big Bear is easy to swallow as a one-day sprint. Turn that into the story's vector and you've got a feature folks might want to spend time with.

Word got out to a few friends that I was making a run up hill. Atypically, no one could get time off for a low-profile ride-along, so I was anticipating being on my own for the drive up the 15. Then Broken Neck Jason called (you do the math on his nickname) to say he was already up in Big Bear at his cabin doing a low-pro thing of his own. "Dude, can you haul up some firewood for me?"

What Beds Are For

He wanted me to bring him logs. Great company they would make. It's my own fault. I've got a knack for grabbing potential firewood when I see it and, considering the weather we've seen in San Diego, there's a lot of it going around. Trees fall down, go boom, and I'm stocked with more burnables than the pot-bellied stove will consume in two years. Everyone asks, so you can't blame Broken for hopping on. I piled the bed with half a face cord; he planned to spend a long weekend with the wife and new baby, and I didn't want him to run out. Funny, half a face cord is a goodly pile of lumber, and it disappeared into the bed of the F-150 like water down the drain. Surely I'd grabbed enough, but it didn't look like much. Ford made the bed of the F-150 two inches deeper for this model (you'll notice the high hipline if you compare the lower hood to the bed), so I figured nothing short of the whole tree would shrink to the eyes.

In case you hadn't heard, there was some rain in San Diego over the winter season. In reality, it wasn't much, but the folks out here tend to be a softer lot and 16 inches in four months sounds like a lot when spoken in the self-absorbed context some Southern Californians tend to use. It doesn't take much rain to complicate things in a dry climate, so there were quite a few people with leaky roofs and crummy drainage, and a few trees fell over. Sadly, some hillsides gave way and some folks lost their homes. Happily, all the rain made for some goooood snow up the hill. Funny, I seem to remember a day back in Chicago we saw 16 inches of rain in one DAY.

It had been raining on and off the week the F-150 was with me. The truck and the sky shared a subtle dark blue, very charming, and it didn't show dirt on the F-150 at all. That made shooting the somewhat dingy test vehicle easier—that and the eternally fogged-in cloudy day, which Ray and I drove through on the way to Snow Summit. If you've got well-diffused light, warm but not sunny, perhaps as on a cloudy day, taking pictures is a lot easier. No glare to fight, no shadows.

The Beauty of a Good Truck

For those of you who are already initiated in what it's like to drive a pickup, the new F-150 is a delectable experience. Honestly, I've probably driven 100 trucks, new and used, from low-rider to quad-axle dump and, with the possible exception of the Toyota Tundra, Ford's new-for-2004 F-150 is the best steering, best commuting, best feeling, most confidence-inspiring light truck ever. It's a joke to say, "Best ever," as things evolve they usually improve, but for truck people it's easy to stick to your guns and be happy with something old that "works just fine." That's the merit of this F-150. It's a big step in pickup evolution, and you will appreciate it.

If you are not a truck person, imagine that the dynamics of driving a truck could be just like those of a car. Dream of the day you can climb out of your see-dan and hop into a full-size pickup like the F-150, without any adjustment to your skill set, and drive competently. OK, now stop dreaming. It's impossible for 90 percent of drivers to do—witness the SUV rollover craze that gripped the nation a few years back. Trucks do not drive like cars: center of gravity, steering and braking hardware, weight, tire function, seating position—everything is different. But this F-150 comes close to bridging that gap. Certain things cannot be changed, like weight and COG, but via facets like steering sensation, tire design, suspension activity and cockpit functionality, vivid steps were made to enable this truck to be as approachable for day-to-day driving as any car.

No Sidesteppin'

As I gave the F-150 a workout going uphill to the slopes, its utter drivability grew more and more legible. The transition behavior, going from left to right on the snug two-laners that lead into the mountains, was almost shocking to feel in a 5,500-lb. truck. Braking action was smooth and quite linear, with noticeable but not overly dramatic nosedive on the way to a confident stopping experience. Damper quality up front is critical for a truck, needing to handle a heavy vehicle without being overbearing and stiff, but most truck designs usually go that way to keep things secure and durable. Ford's new F-150 offers a tractable, usable and light-on-its-feet spring and shock package that contributes mightily to the overall enjoyment of driving the thing.

The wood stacked came nowhere close to the F-150's max load capacity (up near 1,700 lbs.), so neither it nor I felt an inkling of how stable the new pickup's rear end really was under duress. The engineers parked the rear shock absorbers outside of the frame in tandem with wider spring leafs, allowing softer valving and promoting significantly reduced axle hop. One of the hallmark pickup behaviors now lessened in this F-150 is that expansion-joint sidestep: You've all felt it, especially in solid-axle equipped vehicles, and pickups do it worse than most. Not this pickup.

Someone swiped a few of the logs in the truck bed while Ray and I rode. Perhaps it's positive I brought more than I needed, but I don't like to share unless I'm in charge of who gets what. Yeah, I like to be in control. This became an issue as we left the hill—the clouds went to fog in a blink and the drive turned spooky. Nasty weather motoring isn't a problem for me, but when you're surrounded by the folks who've been skiing and snowboarding and partaking all day long, folks whose ill-condition motoring talents were born of Southern California's already questionable driving ethics, you worry. As the saying goes, "It's not 'this' idiot I'm worried about�"

One Problem

That, and it appears the heavily analyzed and engineered new F-150 has a weak spot: the defogger sucks. No setting available on the otherwise intelligent and well-coordinated climate controls could tame the cold/wet fog/rain/snow heavenly slush that turned an easy downhill into a bit of a challenge. We made it to Broken's cabin with some effort (so freakin' foggy we couldn't see street signs until we ran them down) and I figured we were home free. We'd spend a few hours and dodge the worst of the fog and traffic, chill with the Jason Family and play PS2 in front of the fire.

Five minutes there and Ray chirped, "Dude, I've got a customer dropping off his 'Stang at 10:00 p.m. We gotta go!" So much for easy.