The Ford F-150 sells. It has been the best-selling vehicle in North America for decades. And no I don’t mean the best-selling pickup truck — I mean the best-selling passenger vehicle, period, regularly outselling vehicles you’d expect to top the list, like the Honda Civic, Toyota RAV4, and even the Teslas you see everywhere today. Long story short, the F-Series has dominated sales charts for years — 75, to be exact — and Ford decided to commemorate the milestone with the 2023 Ford F-150 XLT Heritage Edition.
The Heritage Edition is essentially an appearance package only available on the XLT trim with the Supercrew cab and 5.5-foot bed. It features a two-tone paint scheme inspired by early Ford pickups, plus interior accents such as a white ’75 Years’ logo on the windshield, a unique welcome graphic on the infotainment screen, and ‘Heritage Edition’ embossed on the centre console lid. The Heritage Edition can only be had with Ford’s 2.7-litre EcoBoost V6 or the normally aspirated 5.0L V8, leaving the rest of the (many) engine options off the table. I’m not sure why Ford decided to limit it to certain engines since it’s just an appearance package, but who am I to comment? These things clearly sell, so Ford must know what they’re doing.
Our tester came with the 5.0L V8, making an even 400 hp at 6,000 rpm and 410 lb-ft of torque at 4,250 rpm, more than what GM offers the Silverado with the 5.3 and about equal to the Ram 1500’s 6.4L V8. The V8 is mated to a 10-speed automatic transmission and together with the V8, the F-150 gives you enough power for day-to-day driving with a wide powerband, and enough towing and payload capacity for almost any task thanks to the available 13,000-pound towing capacity.
The V8 is smooth and surprisingly quiet, and the transmission does it’s job well enough, but occasionally fires off a shift or two that’s clunky enough for you to notice. As expected, there are no paddle-shifters here, but you can limit the top gear if you wanted to. Fuel economy was pretty good, averaging 13.9 L/100 km during our week with it.
You also have a selectable four-wheel-drive system, although it will default to rear-wheel-drive in most cases. In both modes, the F-150 felt surprisingly planted, and it excels in highway cruising, too. The V8 is particularly quiet and the cabin is well-insulated from wind noise. The F-150 is easy to drive around town as well. In slower-speed manoeuvring, the 360-degree camera was sharp and bright, making parking this enormous truck easy.
But there are a few areas that could be improved. You’ll want to keep the F-150 out of Sport mode, which makes the throttle needlessly twitchy, yet also sharpens the suspension just enough to give you confidence in its handling abilities, as the F-150 is a little too floaty and truck-like for my taste in its normal setting. A customizable “individual” drive mode, or simply improved throttle mapping, would make things better.
The F-150’s adaptive cruise control could use a bit more refining, too. It shut off any time you were in the rightmost lane of a highway coming up to an exit. It would also force you to physically shimmy the steering wheel to ensure it stays active, as simply keeping your hand on the wheel generally wasn’t enough to prevent the system from deactivating.
The F-150 Heritage Edition’s interior quality felt pretty average, with black plastic littered throughout the cabin, some “rugged” silver switchgear, and a big 12-inch touchscreen running Ford’s Sync 4 software serving as infotainment. The instrument cluster featured dated-looking analog gauges surrounding a large central screen that provided an abundance of information, including road sign detection. Most vehicles today offer this, but Ford’s way of warning you that you’re over the speed limit — by blinking at you incessantly, as opposed to the more subtle ways other manufacturers do it — is downright annoying at night.
One of the most clever interior features in the F-150 was the optional centre console workbench. It’s easily accessible; just hit a switch near the shifter to tuck it away, fold over the center console lid, and just like that, you have a big, flat work area or lunch table. Genius. Another standout was the Bang & Olufsen sound system, which despite being the eight-speaker, mid-grade variety in the F-150 lineup, sounded pretty darn good. I’d have loved to test out the 18-speaker version that’s available as an upgrade, with speakers integrated in the headrests and 1080 watts of power. Still, most will be plenty happy with this mid-grade B&O system.
The 2023 Ford F-150 XLT Heritage Edition is a good pickup truck, but far from special. The two-tone paint and minor interior trimmings are nice, but I can’t see this becoming sought after in the future. I think Ford knows this too, as the Heritage Edition upgrade is a no-cost option on top of the XLT trim, which starts at $59,125. But when it comes to the F-Series trucks, Ford knows how to sell an F-150, so I’m certain all these Heritage Editions will somehow get picked up — pun intended — in no time.
