1951 Ford F-6 4×4

The 1948 F-Series, however, was their very first truck designed with a dedicated platform designed for a truck’s needs from the start. It was the first-ever light truck that was neither an adapted passenger vehicle nor a scaled-down version of a heavier-duty truck.

The first generation of the F-Series covered a range of chassis in a number of variants, from the F-1 through the F-8. These were numbered according to their capacity, with the F-1 as the lightest-capacity offering and the F-8 as the most heavy-duty. The F-1, F-2, and F-3 were sold either as pickup trucks or as a panel van based on the pickup struck with essentially the only difference being whether the cargo area was covered.

The F-4, meanwhile, was intended as a light-duty commercial truck. The F-5 and F-6 were medium-duty trucks offered as either a standard configuration, a cab-over-engine configuration, or as a school bus chassis. Finally, the F-7 and F-8 “Big Job” were heavy-duty commercial trucks. All of these options let the F-series target every potential niche that a truck could fill and maximize Ford’s sales of it.