There are currently three variations of Ford’s F-Series, but when the line started all the way back in the late 1940s, there were actually eight different models of the truck. The names for these eight different models were extremely simple. The lightest of the trucks was called the F-1 and the heaviest was the F-8, as the remaining six models filled in the gap between the two. These eight trucks were not all ordinary passenger pickup trucks. With the larger numbers, these were commercial trucks. If you were to go to a dealership and purchase an F-Series truck, it was going to be an F-1, 2, or 3.
In 1953, this single digit identifier was replaced, making the lowest weighted F-Series truck the F-100. However, the next two trucks were not called the F-200 and F-300. They were the F-250 and F-350, which are the model numbers we still know today. Why the discrepancy? Well, the F-100 was indeed a renaming, but the F-250 was not. Ford decided to combine the F-2 and F-3 for their three-quarter-ton payload pickup truck, and the halfway point between the two was the F-250. The F-350 was not a renaming of the F-3 but instead a renaming of the F-4. Having your line be F-100, F-250, and F-400 would be rather confusing, so it was called the F-350. That was the F-Series line for many years.
