Ford Rolls Out 'Very Gay' Truck in Response to Homophobic Troll

[left-of-center2012]

When Ford Germany recently unveiled its new blue Ford Ranger Raptor, it got plenty of praise, but there was one piece of feedback the company said “stopped us in our tracks.” A commenter on social media wasn’t a fan of the blue color choice, saying,
“Well, that's a cool car! — But that blue color is very Gay!! Hey Ford! Paint it in BlackNGold or camo!” What happened next was a masterclass in shutting down homophobic trolls.

In a video released on Twitter by Ford Europe, the automaker revealed its new and improved “Very Gay Raptor” decked out in rainbows and gold glitter. In a statement, the company said it wanted to make its position as an LGBTQ+ ally that stands up to discriminatory speech “very clear.”

In the video, the truck gets a digital remake with a gold glitter paint job and rainbow decal, and the whole thing ends with the statement “Happy Pride.” But the company took it one step further and gave the truck a real-life makeover. A 60-hour process saw the vehicle draped in rainbow and gold glitter Alpha foil, then topped with rainbow and heart decals.

This isn’t even the first time that Ford has decked out a Gay Pride vehicle. In 1998, the company wrapped a Ford KA in rainbows in commemoration of the first time it participated in Cologne Pride. This year, both vehicles were in attendance for Pride over the weekend.

https://www.advocate.com/business/2021/8/31/ford-rolls-out-very-gay-truck-response-homophobic-troll

Link to tweet

[Blue Owl]

1. Does it emit glitter?

Kind of like a coal roller -- but except for black smoke, it belches out glitter bombs!

[FoxNewsSucks]

2. That would be hilarious

and what the hell was wrong with the blue color? It's still a sharp looking truck

[LakeArenal]

6. WI has sold purple pickups. They are beautiful.

I once bought a purple IPhone jacket for my husband. The 25 yr old male clerk said you are going to trade yours (blue) right?

I said no. He had a break down I swear.
“Purple is so gay” he said.

I said “well men are over at the Ford dealer
buying $40,000 trucks in purple.
Who’da think that, right?”

[FoxNewsSucks]

14. I've seen purple cars,

They are beautiful, carmakers picked a good dark color of purple for them. I would have gotten a used Cadillac CTS, but apparently for some reason no purple ones were built with a moonroof.

I'd like to get a purple car sometime because I like purple, every one I've seen looks good and they are uncommon.

[LakeArenal]

16. I agree

[Mr. Evil]

30. Older Dodge Chargers used to be available in purple.

And they were totally bad ass!

[SWMO_8541]

38. "Plum Crazy"!

[getagrip_already]

43. We had a dark purple plymouth voyager - it was a 97....

Purple goes way back as a car color. Probably even before it became a "gay" color.

I'm wearing a purple shirt now. Nobody even gives it a second look.

[housecat]

49. I knew someone with a purple BMW

[LeftInTX]

59. Probably just a brat somewhere making a stupid comment

That was a common saying in the 90's and kids used to say it and it had nothing to do with gay anything....It got replaced by the word "lame"...

[lagomorph777]

28. That would be perfect! In the Troll movies, they are always throwing glitter around.

That would really troll the troll.

[Celerity]

3. pics

This isn’t even the first time that Ford has decked out a Gay Pride vehicle. In 1998, the company wrapped a Ford KA in rainbows in commemoration of the first time it participated in Cologne Pride. This year, both vehicles were in attendance for Pride over the weekend.

[Nevilledog]

7. Love it!

[GoCubsGo]

12. Wow! I thought it was just an artist's mock-up in the tweet.

It looks so much better in real life. Please tell me that's a unicorn head on the tailgate.

[smb]

50. It Was A Mock-Up At First, But Then They Painted A Real Truck nt

[aggiesal]

21. Someone from Koln got the truck! ...

Köln
The title wouldn't accept the ö

[JanMichael]

51. Love both vehicles. Nt

[LeftInTX]

61. Awesome!

[Deep State Witch]

4. Make It Available for the US Market

I know a lot of LGBTQ+ folx who would totally buy that.

[haele]

10. Heck, I'm straight and want that truck. Or the car.

They're both beautiful and classy in a retro way.
Make them Electric, and I'm all in. Take all my monies!

Haele

[Deep State Witch]

18. Heck yeah!

It's got a serious Lisa Frank vibe to it.

[bucolic_frolic]

5. Labeling the color blue as gay is just ridiculous

The sky is blue. The ocean is blue. Many things are blue. Blue is a primary color. Blue is part of the American flag. Many people wear blue. Many people say Blue Lives Matter. The more this labeling goes on the more likely some nutjob takes action on it. Imagine getting assaulted or shot because your clothes/car/tie/shoes/eyes are blue! Ridiculous.

[Ka-Dinh Oy]

31. Don't forget they use blue to help show that a baby is a boy.

[bif]

35. Fun fact about that...

In Roman times, pink was a baby boy's color and blue was for girls. Somehow, over the years it switched.

[FBaggins]

46. Not just Roman times

I'm pretty sure that the Biltmore estate's Vanderbilt history rooms include baby photos as recently as ~1900 with pink/blue reversed from the current model.

[Chipper Chat]

40. Maybe it's a homonym thing.

Blue. Blew.
Never mind

[GoCubsGo]

8. Blue is "Very Gay"? Who knew?

It's actually quite refreshing to see a blue vehicle, given how most are gray/silver, black, or white. I hope its emissions consist of unicorn farts, rainbows, and glitter. I look forward to the electric version, hopefully soon.

[llmart]

22. I always buy a car that's a different color from the majority cars on the road.

It helps me find my car in the massive parking lots quicker. I swear that most of them in my area are white or black and that's it. However, a lot of people lease their vehicles here and I don't think they get much of a choice.

[catrose]

29. who knew indeed?

[LeftInTX]

64. My husband has a bright blue Toyota Tacoma

I don't like the color, but he had gotten in a wreck and that was the only color available...

It is very visible....

[CousinIT]

9. Bet Ford would not do that in the US. They'd be run out of business here by the American Taliban nt

[llmart]

19. +1

Those people who work on Ford's assembly line consist of a lot of redneck, Trump humpers - a lot of racists too, so I agree with you.

But if Ford sees them selling like hotcakes in Europe and they're all about the money and profits, who knows?

[multigraincracker]

36. Ford assembly line consist of all kinds of people.

All colors and sexes. I worked in a Ford plant for 30 years and never saw in conflicts. Most likely more accepting than any other blue collar workers.

[SWMO_8541]

39. That's a cheap shot at a lot of hard working Union people.

Not cool at all!

[llmart]

53. I never said anything about their work ethic.

They may be hardworking and maybe the younger generation of plant workers are different, but the plant workers I know in the tri-county area of Detroit where I live have all sorts of racist and sexist jokes. They fly their Trump flags and are union but they vote Republican. Some used to post stuff on Facebook about their support for the tea party.

[LeftInTX]

65. The rednecks would run it off the road in a fit of road rage!

[jmowreader]

11. Sixty hours? Please tell me that included waiting for the gold foil

That gold foil is made out of vinyl, and it’s printable. I could have designed that in a couple hours, printed it on my HP Latex 3200 in maybe three hours (cut that in half if I load two rolls at once, because that’s what you do if you’re running 54-inch stock on a 126-inch-wide printer), laminated it and trimmed it out in less than an hour, and hung it on the truck by the end of the day. Truck shows up boring black and quite hetero at 9 am, leaves the building completely gay by 4 pm.

On edit: it looks like they printed the rainbows on 3M IJ180 and overlaid them on the gold foil. It’s still only a one-day job, because the installers can hang the gold foil while the rainbow graphics are printing, then just stick them to the truck.

My advice to Ford: find a better wrap shop.

[getagrip_already]

44. Ok tough guy, you try getting it done that fast in Germany....

Bet ya a rainbow painted ford you can't get it done without doing it yourself.

[jmowreader]

58. And that's the thing, isn't it?

I have one of these on my shop floor right now:



So, I wouldn't job the thing out at all.

[getagrip_already]

60. but in germany, your employees don't work slve hours....

I said you couldn't do it yourself. You have to have employees do it.

If you don't think ford has ten times the equipment you do in just one small department out of many large ones, you need a nap.

Things take time when your employees go home at a reasonable hour, and actually see their families.

And so friggin what? Relax and smell the vinyl. It can wait a day or two.

[jmowreader]

72. My employees wouldn't HAVE to work "slave hours"

At my wrap shop in North Carolina, we wrapped two Toyota Tundras, which are about the same size as a Ranger, in three hours. This didn't count printing the graphics, but I had much slower printers than the one I have now. That job was unusual because the people who owned the trucks absolutely had to have them out the door the day they showed up...for some reason they couldn't stay with us overnight.

About a year ago, I was tasked to print a 26-foot box truck and knocked the whole thing out in four hours from receiving the files to having laminated and trimmed vinyl. I put two rolls of 3M vinyl in the printer and ran one side on each roll. And if I had the printer I really want (EFI Vutek Q5R, which takes 205-inch-wide media) I'd have been done in an hour and a half. That one we had installed because we don't have the scaffold you need to hang a box truck.

My point is, one truck should not take a week and a half to wrap - especially since they already had the design from the virtual mockup.

[NNadir]

13. It's too bad their cars are so crappy. This would otherwise make me want to buy one.

However I once owned a Mercury Sable that I bought new.

It was the worst car I ever owned. I will never own a Ford Product again, but it's nice they supported the gay community.

[RainCaster]

33. I love my F150, but the paint quality is crap

[NullTuples]

69. Honestly, a lot of factory paint quality is crap these days

Super low VOC paint just doesn't hold up like the old school stuff. Not even close. On the other hand, it doesn't make people sick or ruin the environment.

[radicalleft]

45. As a current Ford employee...

I would encourage you to reconsider your thoughts...there is a reason the F150 is the best selling vehicle in America...and here on the factory floor, we take quality VERY seriously!

[NNadir]

48. The best selling car in America was the Ford Taurus when I bought my equivalent Sable.

The logical fallacy involved in buying something because it is "best selling" is known as Appeal to Popularity.

It is not true that because George W. Bush was an extremely popular President after 9/11 that he was a good President.

The air conditioner on the Sable blew out three times, once under warranty. The seats broke, the mirror fell off the windshield, body parts fell off, the windows stopped working, this all before the engine blew at under 80,000 miles. I'm sure I'm forgetting many of the other problems.

It was however, a very popular car. The company logo at the time was "Quality is job one."

I am lost forever to Ford as a customer; to avoid more people like me in the future, I suggest that your company avoid selling a car where quality was clearly not even remotely a consideration. If that has been addressed, I'm not going to pay to find out if that's true. I have experienced other cars since that have proved far superior.

You can work within the company to address that in your own small way, but in 1993 the car I described was produced and sold to me. I paid the cost of the car in repairs before I junked it, the only new car I ever bought that was worthless when I disposed of it.

For the record, I hate owning a car at all.

Good luck to your company in the future. May you not repeat my experience.

[byronius]

67. My experience is entirely different.

Escort — 225 thousand miles, sold
Ranger — 290 thousand miles, sold
Explorer — 250 thousand miles, still drive it

Low repair costs, safe, easy to work on.

I raised a family on Fords. My next car will be a Lightning (the electric F150 Biden drove) or an electric Raptor.

[NNadir]

68. Well, I can only speak for my own experience. I do maintain my cars, usually at the dealer...

...and I don't think I drive like a maniac.

The car just fell apart, literally. The only positive thing I can say is that the steering wheel never came loose in my hands while I was making a turn. I had to pay someone to haul that piece of garbage away. No one would even give me 50 bucks for parts and metal.

Off topic, but I would never, ever, buy an electric car, but only because I've spent a long time considering the thermodynamics and materials aspects of batteries.

I do dream of a world without cars, though. It won't happen in my lifetime - which is due to end sooner rather than later - but it would be a better world than the one in which we live.

[byronius]

71. No atomic car for you? No fusion-powered muscle buggy? I'd think of all people --

I too wish for a matter transporter powered by a safe dilithium reactor. But until then -- an electric truck would let me go backpacking without flinching quite as much.

I often feel I was born into primitive times. Not enough wise choices.

[NNadir]

74. One of the more objectional things I've heard over the years justifying the vile and dangerous...

Last edited Fri Sep 3, 2021, 08:32 AM - Edit history (1)

...hatred of nuclear energy is that it can't run our stupid cars and save our idiotic car CULTure fantasies.

It doesn't seem that half a century of cheering for solar powered cars or wind powered cars has done a damned thing to make the car CULTure sustainable or power it. Last I looked, we were shattering the bedrock of continents around the world and at sea to obtain petroleum. We saw 420 ppm of the dangerous gasoline waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere this spring, less than 10 years after we first saw 400 ppm concentrations. Now we - many of us, I exclude myself - think that Congolese child slaves can dig cobalt to save our cars, so we can all look at electric car ads featuring wind turbines on once pristine land now laced with service roads, set on steel posts dragged there on diesel trucks powered by petroleum, the steel posts having been manufactured using coal, and the ores for the turbines themselves untimely ripped from the Earth and refined, if not by coal, then by electrolysis using petroleum coke and asphaltene bound carbon electrodes, with the electricity increasingly provided by the combustion of dangerous fossil fuels.

The advertising assumes that most people either do not know or do not care about any of these realities. The latter is more appalling than the former, but still advertisers assume ignorance and/or indifference, usually successfully.

As it happens, I have just written - albeit perhaps not written well - a post in the Science forum about a paper suggesting why the electric car fantasy will prove to be as unsustainable as the gasoline car has, from a paper, ironically in this context, co-authored by scientists employed by the Ford Motor Company and scientists at MIT: The number of elements in the periodic table in car types: ICV, hybrid and plug in hybrid.

While reading the paper that I discussed in my posts, I considered that the Ford Scientists who wrote the paper were far more competent than the engineer who designed my 1993 Mercury Sable, but that is neither here nor there.

Nuclear energy can save the world, freed from fear and ignorance, but that condition this late in the game, with the coasts and interiors of every major continent except Antarctica aflame and/or experiencing extreme temperatures, is not close to being realized. We still have people claiming that "nuclear energy is too dangerous," while not paying a shred of attention to how many vast orders of magnitude more dangerous climate change is. The numbers don't lie. How many people died at Fukushima from radiation again? How many from seawater?

Nuclear energy is a beautiful, remarkable technology, invented by some of the finest minds of the 20th century but subsequently demonized by people who can nevertheless fail to show the intelligence or education to appreciate why an electric car ad showing wind turbine is a detestable lie.

There is among nuclear engineer/scientist types lots of discussions of synthesizing carbon based liquid fuels, including some vastly superior to petroleum based and methane based fuels, using the energy from nuclear heat, water and carbon dioxide. It's not something of which I entirely approve, if in the end the goal is try to sustain the unsustainable car CULTure at the expense of all future generations.

I do not support all the possible applications of nuclear heat that can displace all fossil fuels, and I do not expect a worldwide embrace of science and engineering; anti-science rhetoric is rising, not falling, just as carbon dioxide concentrations after half a century of wild-eyed cheering for so called "renewable energy" are rising, this at an increasing rate. We're now seeing rates of average accumulation rates close to 2.5 ppm/year, nearly 1 ppm/year higher than was observed in the 20th century.

There used to be, by the way, a lot of wind powered transportation in use on this planet, but it was entirely abandoned for commercial purposes across all the oceans and seas in which it was used. People seldom reflect on why it was abandoned, and whether this historical fact - facts matter - makes the construction, at vast expense and much environmental tragedy, of a wind industry reactionary.

Enjoy your car even as I despise mine.

[byronius]

75. As always. well thought-out.

Thanks for the info burst.

[IronLionZion]

15. That truck looks fabulous

[LakeArenal]

17. So many gay sports teams I guess.

WTH is this then?

[mwooldri]

23. The sign for The Gay Dolphin gift shop in Myrtle Beach SC? Nt

[FelineOverlord]

20. 😂😂😂

Link to tweet

[AllaN01Bear]

24. a buddy of mine on skype said adding pink eye lashes would complete the look.

yeppers the american taliban would spit tacks .

[nolabear]

42. You can actually get those! I wanted them for my Mini.

But alas, age and bad knees made me have to trade the Mini for a Subaru. Dependable af but not much personality.

Maybe glitter…

[AllaN01Bear]

25. when the cosmetic firm mary kay was big theyd give pink cars to their

highest dealers .


/revision/latest?cb=20090729102006

[nvme]

26. THAT IS NOT A GAY TRUCK!

Tell if that is a "gay" truck where is the unicorn?

[Loki Liesmith]

27. Why are there news stories about pwning Twitter trolls?

[left-of-center2012]

41. What Ford did is newsworthy

[NullTuples]

70. It wasn't the troll pwning so much as showing support for their employees.

[Mr. Evil]

32. And to think I always hated Fords

because Henry was a racist asshole. I guess this ain't Henry Ford's Ford anymore!

[twodogsbarking]

34. Not available in Texas.

[multigraincracker]

37. Looking forward to the next Gay Parade and the

Ford Precision Driving team preforming lots of tricks.

[onetexan]

47. Looks like something the Fab Five (queer eye) guys would drive & i love it

Hubby & i love their show

[electric_blue68]

52. Baaahahahahaaaaaaa 👍🌈👍

[I_UndergroundPanther]

54. This gay transguy wants it.

If I could drive

[Initech]

55. That's awesome!

I'd park that outside my MAGA religious right neighbor's house!

[denbot]

56. K&R n/t

[Tiger8]

57. I've always loved Fords

Many years ago, Ford's CFO, Allan Gilmour, was a gay man working alongside other top executives in the C-suite.

Gilmour tells his story...he came out in 1996 with an interview in a LGBTQ newspaper. He was never concerned about getting fired, but he knew activist groups like the Christian Coalition would raise a stink, boycott dealers, etc.

It's a reminder about how far we've come - but as Texas shows, the battle with "christians" is never over.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ruthumoh/2019/06/29/gay-in-the-c-suite-at-ford-a-pioneer-looks-back/?sh=777eefb03c09

[sakabatou]

62. Rainbow Dash approves!

[Ron Green]

63. It's fabulous, but it's still got a tail pipe, right?

Not sustainable.

[Retrograde]

66. Don't care for the gold glitter

can I get silver glitter instead?

[twodogsbarking]

73. I remember vans that looked like that in the 70s.

[Crowman2009]

76. Looks like a Bear's dream come true.