2008 Ford F-350 Super Duty Lariat Crew Cab Dualie 4x4

2008 Ford F-350 Super Duty Lariat Crew Cab Dualie 4x4 2008 Ford F-350 Super Duty Lariat Crew Cab Dualie 4x4
First Drive Review

There's a reason full-size-truck previews are often held in Texas. Texas is big. It has big roads. It has big parking spaces. It has lots of those cool water-crossing photo ops. And, yes, it has cheap fuel. Lots of it. Unleaded, super, and—oh, yes—diesel, too. Texas, my friends, is pure pickup paradise.

So what could be wrong about Ford launching its enormous all-new, 2008 F-series Super Duty pickups in Texas? Well, it seems the Lone Star State also has big weather, including big ice storms on occasion, with one particularly awful one blanketing most of Texas late this past winter, paralyzing travel for several of the exact same days the Ford team scheduled the official media drive program. Thus, none of us was able to make it to Ford's Super Duty hoedown, which undoubtedly would have consisted of the regularly prescribed mix of street driving, towing, off-roading, several barbecue lunches, and at least one event involving milking cows or chasing greased pigs. But considering the importance of this vehicle, we arranged to do our own drive as soon as possible, somewhere where weather and smelly livestock are of much less concern: sunny Southern California.

Turns out, there may be lots better places than SoCal for driving trucks as big and brazen as the black F-350 Super Duty 4x4 that showed up, complete with the PowerStroke diesel V-8, a constellation of clearance lights, and, of course, dual rear wheels. It was Ford's ultimate expression of pickup power: towing, hauling, and crew carrying, combined with big-rig badness, leather-lined comfort, and a Texas-sized grille. A six-wheeled bull in a 1000-square-mile China shop, it would either cause tornadic destruction along L.A.'s crowded boulevards or part the sea of hybrids and rented Mustangs with a sort of Moses-like magic. Maybe both.