Wither the Two-Tone Pickup Truck?
Alert readers will know exactly what we’re on about in this entry of our series. Pickup trucks with two-tone color combinations used to roam the country, popping up in every town and city like so much country kudzu. Almost overnight, it almost all vanished. What happened?
At least one brand started down the right track of returning a two-tone choice to the option sheet, showing up in the form of a Ford F-150 equipped with the so-called Heritage package. It does an okay job of reviving the theme, sandwiching a selected color between black bands on the lower door panels and black paint on the roof. It works, to a point - and is certainly better than seeing fleets of grey and silver trucks populating dealer lots.
[Images: Lazy Trout/Shutterstock.com, Nikonysta/Shutterstock.com, Matthew Guy/TTAC.com, Ford]
Become a TTAC insider. Get the latest news, features, TTAC takes, and everything else that gets to the truth about cars first by subscribing to our newsletter.
Speaking of dealers, the smart ones are making their own retro tributes, either painting or wrapping modern trucks with a two tone scheme. Some work better than others, largely down to the individual body lines of whatever pickup with which they are working.
This particular F-150 appeared at the Ford store in this writer’s small town several years ago, looking terrific in bright red with a spear of white down its flanks. Some efforts of this type are hampered by window shape or the failure of head- and taillights to properly alight with the center color, though this one makes it work to great effect.
The style wasn’t limited to pickup trucks, of course. The 1977 GMC Jimmy shown here popped up at a Barrett-Jackson collector car auction some years ago in Scottsdale, showing up for sale in precisely the same paint combo as the one gracing the 1978 Chevy Blazer in which your author grew up. Nostalgia is a helluva drug, kids. It was fortunate I had only registered as media to cover the event for an outlet, not as a bidder with intent to buy anything. There was a real danger my return place ticket would have gone unused.
Numerous models used a physical strip of trim to separate the contrasting paint, sometimes with their own spits of color. This red and white Ford even deploys that trim piece to tie together the front and rear side marker lights, turning a government regulation into a styling feature. And the fact that its design team got that curved bit of trim over the front wheels past the nerds in accounting (on a lowly pickup truck as they were thought of at the time, no less!) must surely have been cause for celebration.
The treatment largely vanished at Ford when the jellybean tenth-gen trucks graced lots for the 1997 model year. These ninth-generation models are generally regarded as the last time a person could stroll into a Blue Oval showroom and find numerous examples of the breed. We’re glad it made a return - even if it was only for a hot minute at Ford.
