Driving the Ford F-450 Super Duty Platinum, king of the load

It’s a Lincoln Town Car plopped down atop a tow-truck chassis. It’s so massive it often doesn’t fit into one parking space length-wise or width-wise. It casts a shadow so vast that the windshields on cars driving next to it can frost over in the chill. It can tow 31,200 lbs. — almost 16 tons — which is likely more than what everything you own weighs, except your house. It’s awesome and ridiculous, overwhelming and frustrating, comfortable and brutal. It’s the Ford F-450 Super Duty Platinum Crew Cab dually 1½-ton pickup.

While Ford has been getting attention for its new all-aluminum 2015 F-150 half-ton pickup, it’s also been cleverly updating its massive Super Duty line of large capacity pickups. While the F-250 and F-350 Super Duty trucks can pass for ordinary trucks, the F-450 is available only with dual rear wheels, and those wheels are commercial grade 19.5-inchers. The wheels are aluminum, but most of the body is still steel.

The biggest news here is the second-generation of Ford’s 6.7-liter Power Stroke turbo diesel V-8. The block is now cast from “compacted graphite iron” for additional strength. The Power Stroke's turbo sits in between the cylinder banks, and the exhaust ports now dump into that valley. This drastically reduces the length of the exhaust tracts and, among other benefits, improves turbocharger efficiency. Audi and BMW use this “reverse flow” design on their turbocharged gas-burning V-8s, but it’s a novelty in this class of diesel ogre.

The second-generation Power Stroke is now rated at 440 hp and 860 lb-ft — some truly beastly numbers. The Power Stroke is down a meaningless five lb-ft to the 6.7-liter Cummins turbodiesel six used in Ram trucks but up 55 hp. And it has a 95 lb-ft and 144 hp advantage over the 6.6-liter Duramax turbodiesel V-8 in the GMC Sierra and Silverado HD trucks. At this point keep in mind that all these trucks are massively powerful and capable; their abilities are all well beyond what the owners of the big boats or long horse trailers will ever need. But overkill has always been a cultural imperative in America. So go ahead and embrace that.

While GM and Ram don’t market their 1½-ton trucks as consumer pickups, Ford does. And that means the F-450’s chassis is beefier than what is under the competition’s one-ton duallies. In particular the F-450’s rear suspension is jarring when the truck is lightly laden and faced with surmounting a mall speed bump. Lugging a fifth wheel trailer the truck is more, well, nuanced in its tail but still stiff.

Driving the F-450 isn’t like whipping along in a slightly larger F-150. The steering is slow and feel-free, the brakes need deliberate application, and the 172.4-inch wheelbase and 263 inches — 21.9 feet! — of overall length mean squeezing into many traffic holes simply isn’t an option. The engine delivers satisfyingly swift acceleration and it works brilliantly with the six-speed automatic transmission, but this thing weighs more than 8,500 pounds even before you put anything in it.

But what the F-450 captain needs to keep foremost in mind is the truck’s great width. Extend the side mirrors to their limits and the truck is 110-inches wide – more than a full foot wider than an F-150. You need to monitor the rear wheels in the mirrors to ensure you haven’t drifted over into another lane and even with the on-board cameras, parking takes concentration. This is not a truck for casual, one-handed horizon chasing.

Incidentally, the four-wheel drive system works well. But it’s for pulling trailers along muddy ranch roads or up slippery launching ramps. Trail crawling is not advised.

The weirdest element of the Platinum edition of the F-450 is the war on between luxury and utility inside the Crew Cab. There’s lots of leather inside, loads of storage cubbies and Ford packs on the electro-gadgetry. But the fake wood on the dash is laughably implausible, and the industrial grade of many interior surfaces fights against leather. After all, though this truck carries a $74,665 price tag, many interior pieces are shared with work truck Super Duty F-250s that sell for as little as $32,240.

Just opening the massive doors on the F-450 feels like an event and the engine is flat-out brilliant. But this is a specialized equipment; a tool for titans of capitalism with lots of toys who takes them to many far-flung places. If you’re that guy, it doesn’t get better than this.

And can I be your friend?