Ford may be the first of Australia’s three carmakers to announce it will end vehicle manufacturing in the country from 2016, but that doesn’t stop it from paying tribute to Australia’s most iconic type of car, the ute.
The forerunner of modern pickup trucks was created in 1933 by a 23-year-old Ford Australia designer, who came up with the idea for the world’s first pickup truck after a Melbourne-area farmer’s wife sent a letter to Ford Australia’s managing director asking for a vehicle with more utility.
This is what the letter said: “My husband and I can’t afford 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?” The request sounded logical to Ford Australia boss Hubert French, who passed the letter on to a young design engineer called Lewis Bandt.
He started to work on the project and developed the Ford utility as a coupe (two-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, providing the vehicle with a cleaner profile and increasing the load area behind the cabin.
Two prototypes were built for testing by the end of 1933, each with a 545 kg (1,200lbs) payload on a wheelbase of 2,845 mm (112 inches). The vehicle entered production in 1934, with Bandt calling his design a “coupe-utility”. It was powered by a V8 engine linked to a 3-speed manual gearbox, while the suspension was by transverse leaf springs with shock absorbers at the front and heavy duty semi-elliptic rear springs and shock absorbers at the rear.
The cabin was the same as the four-door Model 40 Ford five-window coupe, but instead of the rear luggage compartment, Bandt added a wooden-framed utility section with steel outer panels welded to the coupe body to form a smooth-sided vehicle.
The Ford coupe-utility was very popular in rural areas, with 22,000 units sold between 1940 and 1954. More importantly, it paved the way for today’s pickup trucks. It also spawned the Falcon ute, which launched in 1961 as the Falcon XK ute and sold more than 455,000 units to this day.
As for Bandt, his death came in 1987 in an accident as he was driving a restored version of the Utility he helped make famous…
By Dan Mihalascu
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