[VIDEO] Ford Tests New 2015 F-150 at Barrick Gold Mine
Ford Motor Company has released a video of it testing out the first aluminum-bodied F-150 trucks at ‘Bald Mountain’ gold mine in Elko, Nevada. The site, which is owned and operated by Barrick Gold Corporation, is used to experiment if the automaker’s new F-150 trucks can handle the abuse of its most demanding customer, the mining industry.
The Detroit-based company gave six Barrick Gold employees at Bald Mountain and Cortez gold mines the keys to the F-150 trucks and told them to “drive it like you stole it and work it hard.”
The six trucks are part of 11 F-150 “X-1 Prototype” vehicles the company is secretly working on.
“This kind of ordinary mining work truck abuse is what we were looking for when we gave these guys the X1 F-150′s with the aluminum bed. And we learned a few things in the process and made design changes to the 2015 so it’d be better than the steel bed,” said Denis Kanseir, the lead prototype engineer on the project.
“We will have more than 10 million miles of combined testing before the first production F-150 rolls off the assembly line later this year. About 200,000 of those miles will have accumulated right here in Nevada at the Barrick gold mines” says Kansier.
Located in the Southern Ruby Mountains of northwestern Nevada, the Bald Mountain mine is an open-pit, heap leach gold mine. The mine produced 94,000 ounces of gold in 2013.
Next time you see a 2015 Ford F-150 on the road just remember one thing, if it can handle the mining industry, it can handle you.
