“One of every two heavy-duty pickups sold in the United States in the first nine months of the year is a Ford F-Series Super Duty,” Ford says in a news release today.

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However, General Motors can typically argue that combined sales of its two pickup brands — Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra — beat the F-Series line, which includes many models.

Not this year.

Through October, Ford has sold 434,920 of its F-Series pickups compared with a combined 405,512 for Silverado and Sierra.

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Ford still faces stiff competition from GM and Chrysler, who also fielded fresh models this year, said George Peterson, president of AutoPacific, an automotive consulting firm based in Tustin, Calif.

But Ford also has the highest purchase consideration of any automaker, AutoPacific polls show, Peterson said. People say they will shop Ford first, particularly because the automaker eschewed federal bailout assistance, he added.

“Ford is the darling now because they were smart enough to succeed on their own,” Peterson said

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What better proof of the qualities of any given product than the size of the market share it manages to occupy at any given time? While most of the producers of... anything, from toilet paper to weapons, are content with a small, yet solid share on their market, Ford's Super Duty is pretty much the undisputed champion of the heavy duty market, with 50 percent share.

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The numbers are expected to become even better next year, because of the 2011 F-150 which arrives in dealerships later this month. The new F-150 will bring to the market the most extensive “powertrain makeover,“ including the highly anticipated EcoBoost engine (this one, however, will not be launched onto the market until early 2011).

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