Ford Trucks For Sale

Ford Motor Co. may be struggling to hold onto its share of the U.S. car market, but there is one vehicle segment where the Dearborn automaker is not just holding onto a commanding lead, but expanding it: motor homes.

The Blue Oval doesn’t sell recreational vehicles under its own name, but Ford is the leading manufacturer of motor home chassis in the United States. On Tuesday, Ford hopes to widen its lead by unveiling its biggest, most-capable motor home chassis at the annual RV show in Louisville, Ky.

The new F53 Super Duty Class A chassis, in production in Detroit, is all about weight. There are six models in the lineup. The biggest has a gross vehicle weight rating of 26,000 pounds.

That refers to the amount of weight that can be added to the chassis, and titanic numbers like this are just what RV companies are looking for today, according to Rob Stevens, chief engineer for Ford’s commercial truck division.

“It’s all about knowing our customers,” he said.

Those customers are leading motor home manufacturers Winnebago, Fleetwood, Thor and Four Winds. They assemble the bodies — often with extensive customization to meet the needs of individual customers — and attach them to the chassis. The finished products do not bear the Blue Oval, but do include Ford’s trademarked V-10 badge.

“We spend a lot of time traveling to their factories, working with their engineers and finding out what their needs are,” Stevens said, adding that those usually come down to more weight. “Baby boomers want to take their houses with them.”
Comforts of home on wheels

While automakers like Ford work to shave pounds off their passenger vehicle designs in an effort to eke out another mile per gallon, motor home manufacturers are piling on the pounds in a race to provide customers with more comforts of home. Think marble countertops and plasma television sets.

Increasingly, high-end motor homes feature slide-outs, and lots of them. These are portions of the vehicle that can be extended when parked to create more interior space. One slide-out used to be the acme of luxury; now customers are looking for four on a single vehicle.

For the biggest motor homes, Ford is offering its 6.8-liter Triton V-10, which provides best-in-class performance with 362 horsepower and 457 foot-pounds of torque.

In addition to more hauling power, Ford’s new chassis offer improved ride and handling, quieter operation and wheels capable of turning up to 50 degrees in either direction. That compares with a 42-degree wheel cut on current models and translates into a much tighter turning radius — an important consideration for customers trying to navigate their behemoths in the narrow confines of crowded campgrounds.
Made in Detroit

The F53 is produced at a factory inside a Detroit Renaissance Zone. The 33-acre plant, owned by brothers Mike and Carlton Guthrie, operates as a contract manufacturing facility for Ford, with the automaker’s own staff overseeing production on site.

“We’re not quite an arm’s-length first-tier supplier, nor are we a Ford plant. We’re somewhere in between,” Detroit Chassis Plant CEO Mike Guthrie said. “Our plant is entirely dedicated to Ford Motor Co. They’re our only customer and it’s our only product.”

When the Guthries first approached Ford, the RV chassis were being made in Mexico. With help from the city and the United Auto Workers, who agreed to competitive contract terms, the brothers were able to put together a bid to produce the underbodies in Detroit for less than Ford was paying in Mexico. Their factory opened in 1999.
Borrowing from Super Duty

Ford chassis provide the underbodies for 69 percent of the gasoline-powered Class A motor homes and 34 percent of all Class A RVs sold in this country.

“The commercial truck business is a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle. One of the very big pieces of that puzzle is the motor home industry,” said Joe Castelli, director of marketing for Ford’s commercial truck division. “It’s a good business for Ford.”

Ford does not break out financial results for its motor home business, but Castelli said Ford produces about 30,000 RV chassis of all classes each year, accounting for about 10 percent of its total commercial truck output. And it is consistently profitable.

Ford has not always dominated the segment. Before 1999, rival General Motors Corp. was the industry leader. But GM sold its chassis business to another company, giving Ford the opening it needed to pull ahead.

“We continue to use the Ford engineering team, which is a big benefit to us,” Castelli said.

Ford’s Class A chassis benefit from the engineering done on its Super Duty F-series pickups. They also share about half their components with those vehicles, allowing Ford to create real economies of scale that its competitors cannot match.

“It was grown completely out of the Super Duty platform,” Stevens said.

The biggest models borrow from Ford’s F-650 commercial trucks. Castelli said these titans will not only guarantee Ford stays in the lead, but should expand its share even more — even in the face of $3-a-gallon gasoline.
RV sales buck car, gas trends

RV sales often buck the trends prevailing in the broader automotive marketplace. For example, while car and truck sales plummeted after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, motor home sales increased substantially as more Americans looked for vacation alternatives that did not require air travel.

Motor home buyers do not even seem that concerned about rising gasoline prices. While rising fuel costs are taking a big bite out of pickup and sport utility vehicle sales and overall passenger vehicle sales are well below last year’s totals, RV sales are up for 2007 and are expected to increase even more next year, according to the Recreational Vehicle Industry Association.

“Demographics favor that market. You’ve got a lot of people growing older and, as more baby boomers retire, they are looking to travel. Many of the more wealthy ones are choosing to travel by motor home,” said Erich Merkle, an analyst with IRN Inc. in Grand Rapids. “But gas prices still are a risk.”

It is a risk Ford is willing to take, Castelli said.

“This is one of the hidden gems at Ford,” he said. “It’s got a lot of momentum, and we expect it to keep growing.”