Why No Competition in the 450 and 550 Market?

How about the Chevy Kodiak 5500 series?

RR snipped-for-privacy@aol.com

Isn't that more like the F650?

I find that question interesting as well. Here's how I see it. There were no trucks between "light duty" and "medium duty" for nearly 100 years. At one time, medium duty trucks were pretty small, and I guess it wasn't all that strange. In other words, in 1940, when a 1.5 ton truck could carry only (duh) 1.5 tons. Only 3000 pounds - too small to haul a car, and not much of a dump truck either. These old trucks were small and low. There was no need for a product between 1 ton and 1.5 tons.

Medium duty truck engineering was separate from pickups and they evolved in different ways. Pickups really grew in the 50's (starting in 47), but medium duty trucks grew much more and the size difference between them really shot up. It left an obvious void. This persisted for a long time, like 30 years. Ford inserted a product in the void first, calling it the F-superduty in the late 80's. It looked to me like an F-700 low-rider on 16 inch wheels. I wonder what took them so long; the result was Ford enjoys a monopoly on small tow trucks and rollbacks, small emergency vehicles, and lots of other commercial vehicles in that size range. It's interesting to point out that people used to have C30's in all these jobs but they were always too small. Folks just had to live with it. On the highway, it looks like GM blew a big lead in "1-ton" trucks but I don't know what the stats would say. Dodge, of course, stopped making them entirely in 1980 so those statistics are pretty easy!

Obviously GM and Dodge have thought about this market, so my opinion is they don't think it's worth the money to go after it, even though it's clearly a big market. If GM and Dodge want to take a shot at it, they have to develop products AND they'd only get part of the market AND competition would drive prices down. It's not worth nearly as much to go in as the second player. Eventually GM will do it, because they have unlimited resources, and they'll justify it by saying it's good for sales of other (higher volume) trucks. It's a highly visible market. Dodge will not because they have no pretentions of building large trucks anyway.

nope you are not missing anything. the

1/2 ,3/4, and 1 ton pickup lines are "yuppie cars" , just like broncos, blazers, and durangos. ford makes the F450 and 550 for people that need trucks

One other item. Every F-450 and F-550 goes toward the total number of F-series sold there by increasing the numbers for the #1 Selling truck in America