While Antipodeans used their utes – half car, half truck – as a true dual purpose vehicle for transporting sheep and taking the family to town, it’s hard to find any evidence (in a quick image search) that Americans did the same. There are plenty of hot-rodded Rancheros and El Caminos, and plenty being used by urban farmers hauling their stuff in town. Perhaps fuel and full-size trucks were cheap enough in North America, or the farm roads rough enough, that the cars didn’t do well with their actual target demographic. Or perhaps, as is so often the case with utilitarian vehicles, Ford’s marketeers had stumbled on an early lifestyle product – selling an image urban North Americans wanted to project to their community. Period advertising certainly suggests that, with plenty of images of the vehicles parked at some farm with a cowboy standing nearby, or in one ad, just a cowboy hat kind of floating above the truck car. So if you’d like to project a retro-urban-cowboy image, or you just have bulky car parts to haul around, take a look at this 1961 Ford Ranchero for sale for $3300 in Portland, OR.
Rusty But Trusty 