Ford C-Series is First Produced

The Ford C-Series was a medium-duty cab over truck built by the Ford Motor Company between 1957 and 1990. While advertisers boasted of its versatility, it was used primarily for local delivery, and fire apparatus. Many of the fire trucks came merely as cab and windshield models.

Like other automotive manufacturers that built cabover trucks before the 1960s, early Ford C-Series trucks were helmet-shaped cab forward trucks that shared components with the existing F-Series trucks. From 1948-52, they were simply cabover versions of the F-5, F-6, F-7, and F-8. By 1953, they were designated C-Series trucks, but still were little more than helmet-shaped versions of the F-Series trucks.
Models consisted of the C-500, C-600, C-700, C-750, C-800, C-850 and C-900. Like the F-900, the C-900 also included a "Big Job" model. Trucks with diesel engines had an extra zero in the model designations.

As Ford started squaring off its vehicles in 1957, they finally gave the cabovers their own designs separate from the rest of the Ford Truck lineup. The truck looked almost like an angst-filled Fisher-Price toy in appearance. It featured a small grille near the front bumper, with a four-pointed star emblem on each end, the word "F O R D" spelled out below the windshield, and had a cog-and-lightning bolt crest emblem between the headlights. Variations of this emblem were found on many other Ford Trucks during the 1950s and into the 1960s. The C-Series held onto this logo the longest. As with the cab-forward C-series, models consisted of the C-500, C-600, C-700, C-750, C-800, C-900, and the C-900 "Big Job" model.
Some historians have erroneously referred to the Ford tilt-cab as the "Budd" cab, inferring that it was an off the shelf item available to anyone. The C-Series cab was designed by Ford, tooled at Ford's expenses and built by the Budd Company to Ford Motor Company specifications. Other truck manufacturers had to obtain Ford approval before purchasing it. The exception was...

The Ford C-Series trucks saw few changes for 1959 -- and didn't need any. Tandem-axle versions had been introduced in late 1958, which further increased their popularity.

Ford celebrated a production milestone in 1959 when its 50-millionth car -- a Galaxie hardtop -- left a company assembly plant. Ford cars outsold those of rival Chevrolet that year, putting a finishing touch on what had been an exciting decade.