Over 100 years ago, the very first all steel body for an automobile was built, and from there, that was the standard material you were going to use to build your vehicles. It didn’t matter if it was a coupé or a pickup truck, that strong metal was always the way to go. That was until the 1970s when automakers started the gradual phase out of steel in favor of aluminum. This is a much lighter material than steel, which in turn allows you to get to faster speeds without putting as much burden on your engine. It made a lot of sense to switch to this new material, but there was a major section of the automobile landscape that wasn’t really making that change in that time. That would be pickup trucks.
Because these are very large vehicles meant for hauling payloads, there was a hesitancy to switch truck bodies over to aluminum, as the lighter weight maybe would prevent the truck from being able to handle what it needs to haul or tow. It would take quite a while before an American manufacturer would bite the bullet and build a pickup truck with an all-aluminum frame. That company would be Ford, and once that company did it with the F-150, Ford’s best-selling vehicle of all time, you will be hard-pressed to find a modern pickup truck built on a steel frame anymore. You may think it took a decade or two for Ford to make this change, but this shift happened much closer to today than you might expect.
Only aluminum for a decade
Ford first introduced an aluminum body to the F-150 in 2014 for the 2015 model year, meaning that the first American aluminum pickup truck marks its 10th anniversary the year this was written. Compared to smaller cars making this switch nearly 50 years ago, it is almost shocking how modern this change is. Originally, this was only done for the F-150. This makes sense as this is already the smallest and lightest truck in Ford’s F-Series, and the switch away from steel allowed this to lose 700 pounds of weight. The 2025 Ford F-150 XL with a regular cab and a 2.7L EcoBoost V6 engine — the smallest an F-150 can be — has a curb weight of 4,687 pounds. If it still had that extra 700 pounds on it, that would put it in the same weight category as the aluminum-based double cab hybrid version with a 3.5L PowerBoost V6 engine.
Ford expanded its aluminum usage for its pickup trucks two years later when the company decided to start making its 2017 model year Super Duty trucks out of the material as well. These are Ford’s heavy-duty trucks that may even utilize large Power Stroke V8 engines, and it believed that it would be able to have these trucks operate just as well. That ended up being the case, and now, Ford uses aluminum bodies across all of its trucks.
Aluminum is better for EVs
For a lot of people, a lighter weight vehicle mostly means that it is able to achieve higher speeds more quickly. However, there are other implications at play, which car manufacturers would not have even thought about when they were initially making this change with smaller vehicles back in the 1970s. This has to do with the rise of electric vehicles. Part of the appeal of an EV, aside from the environmental benefits that come from driving one, is efficiency. As this technology continues to evolve, part of the goal will be to improve how far a vehicle is able to travel on a single charge. Having an aluminum body helps with this tremendously thanks to the lighter weight.
This is important for Ford trucks too, because the company has introduced a couple of electric pickups for purchase, such as the Ford Maverick and the incredibly popular Ford F-150 Lightning. Having switched over to that aluminum base, it made transitioning these trucks over to utilizing electric motors far more seamless. Another benefit is that aluminum is fairly corrosion-resistant, and EVs have a greater risk to corrode because of the material used for batteries and wiring. Environmentally, aluminum is also a plus because it is entirely recyclable, and because sustainability is such a big part of this push to all-electric, this provides that for the Ford trucks. The company has been using aluminum for ten years now, and there is very little reason why it should turn away from it now.
