Ford marks 80th anniversary of Ute

Farmers, tradies, Deni Muster participants and Aussie automotive fans rejoice, today is an important anniversary -- the 80th birthday of the Ute… Even Ford head office is celebrating… Or at least issuing a press release…

Says the Blue Oval, a young Ford Australia designer created the ute “by listening to the farming family’s request for a vehicle with more utility”.

That happened in February 1934, the company asserts.

“In mid-1933 the then managing director of the Ford Motor Company of Australia, Hubert French, received a letter from a farmer’s wife in Gippsland, Victoria,” says Ford’s blurb.

“She wrote: ‘My husband and I can’t afford a car and a truck but we need a car to go to church on Sunday and a truck to take the pigs to market on Monday. Can you help?’ What the customer wanted was a vehicle with passenger car comfort but could also carry loads.”

According to Ford’s account, French passed the letter on to the company’s only designer, Lewis (Lew) Bandt, then just 23. The result, Bandt’s coupe utility, was a first for Ford Australia and the world.

Ford says the Australia design is “a key part of Ford’s rich heritage that has seen the development of such iconic vehicles as the F-Series”.

The full-size pick-up (a very un-Australian term) remains to this day Ford USA’s mainstay and its largest selling domestic model. Indeed, in 2013 Ford’s F-Series was the best-selling ‘truck’ in the United States for the 37th consecutive year, as well as the best-selling vehicle in the country for the 32th straight year

Closer to home, Ford’s first Falcon utility, the XK, was launched in 1961.

The passenger-car derived Ford utility will alas die with Falcon when local Australian production ceases in Q4 of 2016.

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