Your new Ford F-150, Ford Super Duty, or F-150 Lightning will back up to your trailer and line up your hitch to the trailer’s tongue all by itself (with you monitoring it). Ford’s truck team secured up to 60 patents to create the new Pro Trailer Hitch Assist feature that controls your truck’s speed, steering, and brake to back up directly to the hitch of your conventional “bumper-pull” trailer. This feature is not available for gooseneck or 5th-wheel trailers (yet).
In order to operate this feature, the driver is in the truck, the driver pushes and holds the Pro Trailer Hitch Assist button, and the truck figures out the best backup path to the trailer from up to 20 feet away. The truck backs up by itself, the driver must verify that the trailer’s tongue is higher than the truck’s hitch, and then the truck completes the backup process.
Will this feature get it exactly right every time, and will it work fast enough to be useful? We will test it very soon to find out.
Trailer backup assist features are not new. Ford first introduced the trailer backup assist nearly eight years ago. Check out the video below.
