1949 Ford F-1 and 2019 Ford F-150 Limited

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.

M O T O R I E S

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.

In the late ’40s, most of what was written for car-buyers came from newspaper auto sections, and many authors of these sections also called on car dealers or car companies to sell the ads that ran in their section. Not surprisingly, their work was short on “criticism.” Pete and his pal Walt Woron dreamed up the name Motor Trend. As editor, Walt sought to emulate the work of Britain’s Motor magazine. He made it MT’s mission to report on the whole industry, rather than focusing on sports or foreign cars as our competitor Road & Track was doing. This meant delivering rigorous objective testing, reporting on future automotive technologies, covering current industry and motorsports news, and exploring the latest trends in car culture—the epicenter of which was our Southern California home.