"We give our F-150s a thorough beating beyond anything customers will put them through. Before a customer puts his new F-150 to work, we've been hard at work putting more than 5 million miles of durability, development and evaluation testing on prototypes to ensure they have earned the Ford Tough label." - Gurminder Bedi , Ford Vice President, Ford Truck Vehicle Center

Under a scorching sun at 120 degrees Fahrenheit with no shade and no wind, Ford engineers drive trucks for hours, days and weeks on end. They drive them over dusty gravel roads, hot concrete curves, pools of mud and rocky hillsides, over and over again.

For more than 20 years, most Ford F-150 durability testing has been carried out at Ford's Arizona Proving Ground (APG) in Yucca, Ariz. The proving ground and the Yucca area offer a unique combination of climate and topography - from 500 to 3,900 feet above sea level - to test trucks beyond normal and extreme limits. The average summer temperature at APG is a dusty and dry 103 degrees Fahrenheit with peak temperatures exceeding 120 degrees.

Trucks, their powertrains, body and frame structures, cooling systems, front- and rear-end systems, electrical systems and anti-corrosion elements are tested on 50-miles of special road surfaces from paved highways to square-edged pothole riddled gravel roads. Test trucks, both 4x4 and 4x2 configurations, are verified over tens of thousands of miles of durability testing.

Each F-150 durability prototype was put through 71,000 miles of powertrain, structure and trailer towing testing. Routes included the five-mile high-speed track, rough roads designed to cause accelerated structural damage and several steep grades to validate the powertrain.

In addition, complementary lab and dynamometer testing was conducted on subsystems and components.

Arizona Proving Ground Tests

The Arizona Proving Ground's 50 miles of specialty roads are the training camp of the Ford truck. It is here that F-150s are put through such drills as the Sandwash, Twist Ditch, Translator Hill, Power Hop Hill and Mudbath.

The Sandwash looks like a giant sandbox. Only a four-wheel-drive vehicle can get through its two-foot deep bed of loose desert sand. Designed to tax the drive system, it measures the toughness and durability of the front-drive axle, the transfer case and the rear-drive axle. Test trucks are exposed to 750-1,000 miles in the Sandwash.

The Twist Ditch tests the 4x4 frame and body durability on an F-150 driven diagonally through a large ditch. When a truck is in the ditch, its weight is largely supported on diagonally opposing wheels, inducing maximum torsional loading of the body and frame structure. Test trucks make more than 3,000 passes through the Twist Ditch.

Translator Hill - a 3,900-foot peak in the Hulalapai Mountains -provides a stringent test to the 4x4 system. The only way to scale its boulder-strewn surface is in four-wheel-drive - all the way up and all the way down. Translator Hill, which gets its name from the communications equipment at the top, tests a truck's gradability, braking capability and powertrain toughness on a steep, unpaved incline. Test trucks prove themselves over 100 miles on Translator Hill.