Will Ford Own the Texas State Fair Auto Show?
So far this year, Ford has had a product announcement at all of the big auto shows. They unleashed the Raptor, Ford GT, and Shelby GT350 R at the North American International Auto Show. They showed off the Police Interceptor version of the Ford Explorer (with that darn cute dog winning the show) at the Chicago Auto Show. The Lincoln Continental rolled into the New York International Auto Show. Basically, every auto show this year has been, more or less, won by Ford. But what about the next big show on the docket?
The Texas State Fair Auto Show is actually the largest auto show in the country when it comes to attendance by the public. It’s also the biggest market for some of the biggest vehicles sold in the country. This year, Ford is showing off the brand new Super Duty pickup truck.
But, will they steal this show as well? Considering it’s a truck show, we look at Toyota, Nissan, General Motors, and Ram Trucks for competition.
We don’t believe that there’ll be a Toyota announcement there, even though there was a recent move by Toyota to setup their headquarters in Plano, Texas. Don’t forget, the Tundra is built in San Antonio.
General Motors won’t show up to the show empty-handed, but since they’ve already tipped their hand with the redesigned Silverado and Sierra, I wouldn’t expect anything too Earth shattering. The new trucks will probably be there, but unless they pull a ZR2 rabbit out of their hats, I’m not sure they’ll get people too excited.
Nissan’s Titan will probably be there, and will probably be sporting the Cummins diesel-equipped XD version, but that’s something we’ve known about all year.
So that leaves Ram Trucks. They’ve already refreshed for the 2016 model year, so if we see an announcement from them it would be for something farther into the future. That doesn’t mean we wouldn’t see something like a special edition, but we’re not sure.
Ram already one-upped the current Super Duty earlier this year by offering their 3500 with 900 lb-ft of torque. While we don’t have numbers yet on what the new Ford Super Duty will offer, we do completely expect them to exceed that number, along with exceeding the Ram’s maximum towing capacity.
The Texas State Fair is an auto show we pay attention to here, since it’s a show that consists mostly of the products you care about. Throughout the year, we ask automakers if they have plans for the show. Normally, we get a “we can’t talk about future products” type of response, but occasionally we hear rumblings.
So far, we’re expecting the Ford Super Duty to be the announcement of the show. In the weeks following we’ll be talking about the latest technology offered in the truck. We’ll be talking about engine and powertrain options. We’ll be talking about the aluminum body. Heck, we’ll probably be talking about how the darn truck looks.
At the end of the day, we think that’s what we’ll be talking about, along with the rest of the media. We think it’s going to be another Ford dominated show. We’ll have to wait and see, but they are having one heck of a year.
What do you think? Let us know over in the forums!
