Ford F250

The same goes for towing, and if your tub is on the hefty side of gargantuan, we will introduce you to your next tow vehicle.

Ford Australia has been out of its parent company's F-series range for a few years. Crook build quality and some less-than-perfect right-hand-drive conversions over the years soured the deal and Ford pulled its corporate head in and got on with selling Falcon Utes.

Well, the Ute is still a major money-spinner for Ford (more so than ever, in fact) but now the F-Series is back.

Built at a dedicated F-Series plant in Brazil, the vehicles we get here aren't converted; they're factory-built right-hookers.

Ford Australia hasn't bothered with the F150 (there's too much cross-over with the Falcon Ute) but is selling F250s and F350s in both two and four-wheel-drive form.

The one we've looked at here is the F250 (with the smaller payload) but in all other respects it's the king of tow-vehicles.

Start with four-wheel-drive, throw in a big kerb weight and then garnish with a 7.3-litre turbo-diesel V8. Pardon? You heard right; this is the grandaddy of all light trucks.

Ford offers a four-speed automatic gearbox or a six-speed manual with a crawler gear first ratio (although why it's needed when the thing has a proper set of low-range ratios anyway beats me). The other problem with the floor-shifted manual option is that it's possibly the heaviest, slowest shift action I've used in a long, long time.

The automatic is column-shifted and makes a lot more sense, particularly when the torque figure of 684Nm (no, that's not a mis-print) at 1800rpm is taken into account. Outright power? Try 175kW at 2600rpm for size. If the manual box is truck-like, so is the engine itself. The glow plugs take an age to pre-heat the combustion chambers and the engine is noisy from idle to redline. But it does pull like a train and all that torque is enough to move the F250's bulk reasonably well.

Don't get confused; it's still no race-car, but you get the impression that hitching the biggest trailer boat to its ample rump won't make a huge difference to the rate of acceleration when the chips are down.

Suspension reflects the fact that the F-Series is designed with big loads in mind, so unladen it's less than limousine smooth. In fact, cross train tracks at any speed or tackle the usual crap surface of most city streets and your fillings will be at risk.

The brakes, however, are great and should have no trouble coping with a tonne or two of tub.

Some things haven't changed, though, and the lousy interior plastics that afflicted earlier F-trucks haven't been improved dramatically.

The F250 also requires plenty of athletic ability to get in or out (or should we say, up or down, because it's quite a climb) and those in the habit of wearing skirts (that'd be a lot of girls, then) aren't going to like this feature.

Bottom line: It's a truck, Jim, but a hell of a way to move a big trailer boat and do it safely into the bargain.