Ford’s Ubiquitous Oz Ute Marks 80th Anniversary

When a 23-year-old Ford Australia designer created the ute – the forerunner of modern pickup trucks – in response to a farming family’s request for a vehicle with more utility, he started something still going strong 80 years later.

Now Ford is celebrating the 80th anniversary of the iconic ute, an Australian invention that has been exported to the world, reinterpreted by other automakers and gained a legion of fans everywhere.

The story of the first Ford ute is a key part of the Blue Oval’s rich heritage.

The first integrated passenger-car-based ute was born out of necessity in mid-1933, when Hubert French, Ford Australia’s then-managing director, received a letter from a farmer’s wife in Gippsland, Victoria.

She wrote: “My husband and I can’t afford (both) 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 she wanted was a vehicle with passenger-car comfort that also could carry loads.

French passed the letter on to a young design engineer, Lewis (Lew) Bandt, who had joined the company a few years earlier as Ford’s only designer.

Bandt was only 23 but already was showing a flair for design that made him famous until he retired in 1975.

His take on the car-based utility was considered revolutionary at the time. Where his design differed was that he developed his vehicle as a coupe – a 2-passenger, steel-paneled, glass-windowed car with an integrated steel-paneled load-carrying section at the rear.

He blended the “pickup” sides into a coupe body, which provided a cleaner profile and increased the load area behind the cabin.

Bandt sketched out his ute on a blackboard, giving it a 1,200-lb. (545-kg) payload on a wheelbase of 112 ins. (2,845 mm).

He completed his original design in October 1933 and quickly produced two prototypes for testing. By Jan. 23, 1934, he had the final drawings and the new Ford ute went into production with Bandt christening his design a coupe-utility. When the first utes came off the production line in 1934, two were sent to Canada.

The car even caught the eye of Henry Ford.

In its day, the Ford coupe-utility boasted a V-8 engine and 3-speed manual gearbox, while its suspension used transverse leaf springs with shock absorbers at the front and heavy-duty semi-elliptical rear springs and shock absorbers at the rear.

The cabin was the same as the 4-door Model 40 Ford 5-window coupe. But instead of the rear luggage compartment or “dicky seat,” Bandt added a wood-framed utility section with steel outer panels welded to the coupe body to form a smooth-sided vehicle.

The result was quickly hailed as the “must-have” vehicle for rural communities and 22,000 were sold between 1940 and 1954.

Ironically, Bandt died in 1987 after being involved in an accident driving a restored version of the vehicle he helped make famous.

The original Bandt-designed Ford ute paved the way for what has morphed into what has become some of the world’s biggest-selling vehicles – pickups and utilities. It also spawned the Falcon ute, launched in 1961 with more than 455,000 sold since.

The Australian-designed and -developed Ford Ranger also is widely sold in more than 180 countries.

Ford pickups globally represent one out of every five pickups sold, and the F-Series is the all-time best-selling pickup truck with more than 33 million sold, twice as many as the No. 2 vehicle, the Model T (16.5 million).