Tommy Tu-Tone: 2023 F-150 Heritage Edition is Ford's New Take on Retro

There have been numerous examples of local dealers appending various and sundry new pickup trucks with paint or a wrap trying to capture the two-tone color schemes of the ’80s and early/mid-’90s. Thanks to the body lines of modern trucks, the results can be varied.

Ford wants in on the action, choosing to celebrate 75 years of trucks with a Heritage Edition of its popular F-150 which attempts to recreate the look

While the demarcation point of color isn’t billiard table flat or completely rectilinear as it could be on the squared-off brutes from thirty-plus years ago, the so-called A-B-A paint arrangement does a decent job of recalling the past – even if it reminds your author an awful lot more of an SUV with a black roof (of which there are many) than his grandfather’s truck. In any event, we’ll give ‘em an ‘A’ for effort.

Upper and lower parts of the truck (read: Roof and rockers, essentially) can be painted either Carbonized Grey or Agate Black. The latter can be paired with Atlas Blue, Avalanche, or Area 51; the former with Race Red or Antimatter Blue. Props to Ford for offering some real colors with this package instead of the typically muted palette of greys and silvers. In addition to the roof and rockers, Heritage Edition trucks will also have their bumpers and lower doors dipped in the contrasting paint.

This package will appear as an option on XLT-grade pickups, with all its attendant features, though there’s no indication of with what it can and cannot be combined in terms of other packages. While there are approximately eleventy-billion ways to configure an F-150 or any pickup from the Detroit Three, there are often certain options that cannot be mashed together. Some make sense – like street performance tires on a Tremor – while others defy logic. Consider the fact that, for a hot minute, one couldn’t get towing mirrors on a factory-equipped Silverado Z71 until someone woke up at their desk in RenCen and rectified the situation. Dealers, meanwhile, were more than happy to retrofit after the fact.

We’ll also note this is not the first time in recent memory Ford appended a ‘Heritage’ to its F-150. When the new-for-2004 truck appeared, execs weren’t wholly convinced all hands would cotton to the new look, choosing to produce both the old and new body styles side-by-each for a single model year (or they had a lot of leftover 10th-gen body parts, depending on who’s telling the story). The old-school pickup was called the F-150 Heritage and sold for fire-sale lease prices. Ram employs a similar trick today, making bank by hawking a machine that first saw the public light of day in January 2008 and passing it off as a new truck 14 years later.

Ford says pricing for the Heritage Edition package will be available when order banks open in mid-July, with production planned to start this autumn.

[Images: Ford]