Pioneering All-Terrain Pickups
All pickups are useful, but four-wheel drive infinitely expands a light truck’s horizons. Whether it be negotiating dusty desert terrain, scaling rocks, or churning through deep mud and snow, a transfer case and live axles makes getting cargo where it needs to go a whole lot easier and safer. There’s no end to the great four-wheel-drive light haulers we could profile, but here are a few interesting examples.
1966 Ford F-250
More than 80 percent of F-150s sold today are equipped with Ford’s four-door SuperCrew cab–the preferred configuration of buyers with families. But prior to 1965, Ford didn’t build a four-door truck, and the demand for additional passenger room from utilities, logging companies, railroads, the military, and others was met by aftermarket coachbuilders.
Among the firms performing these crew cab conversions–on not just Fords but virtually every make of light truck–was Crown Steel Products of Orrville, Ohio. In addition to building crew cab pickups, Crown built utility bodies, sleeper cabs for heavy trucks, and more.
This truck, an unusual 1966 Ford crew cab F-250
