We started calling it the swank truck. The 2019 Ford F-150 Limited interior has the same mediocre plastics found in any of Ford’s half-ton trucks, but nearly all of them are covered in leather. The seats get leather too, of course, but it’s buttery soft stuff in a rich brown that looks like it was diverted from Restoration Hardware.
The price for all this swankiness is $74,575. Shocking yes, but the F-150 King Ranch I dropped a half-ton of rock into last summer was only $280 less. It had virtually all of the Limited’s feature content, albeit added as $20,000 worth of options, plus the $3,000 Power Stroke Diesel engine that makes for a questionable value proposition given its meh capability and fuel economy.
So it’s the H.O. V6 that makes the F-150 Limited stand out. It has a profound acceleration advantage over the most powerful Ram 1500, which I drove the week before, moving well beyond “capability” into the realm of indulgence.
In general, though, it’s wonderful (and fairly bad-ass) that Ford chose to put such a performance engine in a non-performance variant, much like in the 1960s when it would put the Mustang’s optional big-block V8 under the hood of a luxury model like the Ford Thunderbird. Just because you want max power, it doesn’t mean you want max-attack handling and a crummy ride.
Ultimately, choosing the Limited rather than a loaded King Ranch or Platinum comes down to the H.O. V6. And if you’re spending more than $70,000 on an F-150, why wouldn’t you get the biggest, baddest engine currently in a production truck? Well, the 22-inch wheels, for starters, but besides that, I’ve got nothing. The real question, though, is whether all that leather and fancy-pants features are worth the $20,000 premium any of these swank trucks seems to command. Frankly, the answer seems to be “no.”