By Briton Ryle
As of Monday, you could place your order with a Ford dealer for a brand new 2015 F-150. The F-150 is the best-selling truck in history, and it has been the best-selling line of vehicles for 32 straight years. Ford sold 763,402 of them in 2013.
U.S. and Canadian dealers on Monday began ordering 2015 Ford F-150 pickup trucks, which are lighter than earlier models, priced higher and include additional standard features, the company said.
For a long time, global automakers have been reluctant to sell inexpensive vehicles in China because they didn’t want to reduce the healthy profit margins on their products.
But the landscape is changing and now foreign automakers are jumping into China’s entry-level market.
The MY 2015 Ford F-150 will offer a new high-output, twin-turbo 2.7-liter EcoBoost V6 producing 325 hp (242 kW) and 375 lb-ft (508 N·m) of torque. Due to the extensive lightweighting in the new F-150, this will improve the power-to-weight ratio of the 2015 truck by 15% over the 2014 5.0-liter V8-equipped F-150 with similar torque output.
Ford is introducing 25 new models by 2016 in Africa and the Middle East, where it projects the driving age population will grow 31 percent by 2023 to 1.7 billion people.
