Ford’s decades-long management place in truck gross sales is hard-won, as the corporate has regularly labored to develop ideas that might enchantment to drivers.
That is how the F-150 has gained a gradual stream of recent options, and it’s how Ford has pioneered new market segments with best-sellers just like the four-door Ford Explorer SUV in 1991 and the latest budget-priced, hybrid-electric Maverick unibody minitruck.
On the 1981 Detroit Auto Present, Ford displayed an idea for an thrilling compact pickup with futuristic styling that might have checked out house in a science-fiction film of the period. This was the Montana Lobo, a automobile Ford billed as a “glimpse of the way forward for off-road autos.”
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If that future resembled the film Dying Race 2000, maybe.
The idea was developed by Ford’s Superior Worldwide Design Heart and the Ghia Building Studios in Turin, Italy. Earlier than Ford spoiled the studio’s identify by making use of to hideous baroque barges designed in Dearborn, Ghia was a revered Italian design home purchased by Henry Ford II, who you might recall from the Ford Versus Ferrari film.
Rear view of the Montana Lobo within the snow.
The zoomy fiberglass two-seat cab and mattress with rakish buttresses included tinted plastic bubble doorways and Plexiglas T-top roof. Each the doorways and the roof panels have been detachable, and designers included nylon webbing within the openings for safer doors-off operation. The Montana Lobo’s press launch describes this as “helicopter-style” webbing, however at this time it remembers the window nets in Nascar race vehicles.
Ford’s gross sales brochure for the 1980 Thunderbird reveals that automotive’s digital show that was used within the Montana Lobo idea truck.
Within the cockpit, designers repurposed the instrument panel from a 1980 Thunderbird. It additionally included an overhead console with extra devices, a clock, and “an advisory warning system.” No matter meaning.
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This avant-garde bodywork sat atop a first-generation 1966-’77 Bronco body and chassis with working boards, a roll bar, a winch, and off-road tires. It had a 107.3-inch wheelbase, size of 188.9 inches, width of 75.4 inches, and peak of 77.4 inches. This makes it near the identical measurement as a four-door Bronco at this time.
This 289 small block V8 within the 1966 Bronco is successfully the identical as the marginally bigger 302 V8 from the ’77 Bronco that was used within the Montana Lobo.
Energy was Ford’s beloved small block V8, which it described as 302 cubic inches and 5.0 liters for advertising and marketing functions, however which was really 301 cubic inches and 4.9 liters. It was backed by Ford’s C4 light-duty three-speed automated transmission driving the Bronco’s four-wheel-drive system.
Ford designers had inventive interpretations from the Bronco’s very starting, beginning with this 1966 Bronco Dunes Duster idea automobile.
Ford pointed to the Lobo’s loading-ramp tailgate, facet panel storage areas, and vented seats as potential future manufacturing objects, and certainly, at this time we see storage compartments within the sides of pickup truck beds and seats which can be heated and cooled are commonplace.
Ford’s 1992 Bronco Boss idea revisited the Montana Lobo’s yellow paint and flying buttresses, however it was primarily based on the a lot bigger 1978-1996 Bronco chassis.
“The Lobo represents greater than a present automobile,” stated William H. Cramer, supervisor of the Superior Worldwide Design Heart on the time. “It’s a set of concepts and designs which may be utilized in future Ford four-wheel autos.
In actual fact, Ford by no means did put something resembling the Montana Lobo into manufacturing, however in case you squint, the Chevrolet Avalanche wasn’t too far off.
The 2010 Chevrolet Avalanche employs roof buttresses and varied improvements similar to a pass-through from the mattress to the cab within the spirit of the Montana Lobo idea.
