Turns out the prices are fairly close. . .

By Gary S. Vasilash

When you think of the quintessential full-size pickup truck, the sort of thing that you imagine farmers loading with bales or hay or contractors carrying loads of gravel, it is probably the Ford F-Series.

With good reason, given Ford sells those trucks the way McDonald’s sells hamburgers. The numbers are staggering.

But odds are, those images of the F-Series are probably not entirely accurate.

Listen to Erin Keating, executive analyst for Cox Automotive, talking about vehicle transaction prices in May.

First she notes: “The popularity of fully loaded, full-size pickup trucks that are more luxurious than many luxury vehicles is unique to the U.S. market.”

Which can be understood that (1) there aren’t a lot of full-size pickup trucks sold in other markets around the world* and (2) those trucks are probably used as utility vehicles (e.g., the opening examples).

Keating does on: “The Ford F-Series outsold BMW 2-to-1 in May, and BMW’s ATP [average transaction price] was only marginally higher than the F-Series.”

Whereas the average transaction price for a BMW in May was $72,946, the ATP for an F-Series was $67,837.

Now that’s about a five-grand difference, which isn’t exactly trivial.

But somehow a Bimmer seems as though it is in another category all together compared with something that you probably once saw with a decal of Calvin relieving himself on a Chevy bowtie on the back window of the truck.

Of course, not a $68,000 truck, but nonetheless. . . .

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*That full-size pickups are pretty much indigenous to the U.S. market is something that makes the development of EV versions of the trucks somewhat problematic in the long run. That is, on a global basis something like the Ford Mustang Mach-E has more applicability than an F-150 Lightning. While it seems to have been thought by some OEM execs that because customers in the U.S. buy lots and lots of trucks, then if a somewhat sizable percentage of them buy electric versions then everything will be great. For reasons including cost and/or performance, that is not proving to be the case. This means that scale isn’t being achieved, and if there is something that is necessary for an OEM, it’s that. So by spending lots of engineering and manufacturing resources on making a type of vehicle that has a limited domestic market and a nearly non-existent global market, achieving scale is anywhere is not particularly likely.