The Ford Durango ‘Truck’ Was Real and Really Rare, And You Can Buy One Now

Everybody remembers the Chevy El Camino—the car-with-a-truck-bed was around from the 1960s into the late ’80s. Ford had a version too, called the Ranchero, over a similar timeline. But far more obscure is its would-be successor. Meet the Ford Durango: an unofficial, coachbuilt “what-if” car made in minimal quantities. We just stumbled on one listed for sale in Vermont for $11,000.

When this Craigslist link was dropped into our editor’s chat, I thought there was just some simpleton selling an SUV they didn’t know the name of. But nope,—the Ford Durango is real. It was basically a Fairmont with the back lopped off and turned into a truck bed. It seems this was not officially a Ford product, but rather a custom conversion organized by another company before the vehicles (mere hundreds of them in total) were sold through dealers.

Reliable info on the Ford Durango is not that easy to come by. They were made by an outfit called National Coach Products in California, which either no longer exists or is well hidden from the internet. Classic car authority Hemmings had an article on it in 2008, but it’s gone from the publication’s main site and I wasn’t even able to find a cached version to reference. Maybe somebody’s got an archival link they want to drop in the comments?

Meanwhile, I was able to find some discussion about these vehicles in an old forum thread on Ford Truck Zone. Critically, user KW5413 copy-pasted this great nugget in connection with the old Hemmings story, attributed to a Mr. Bill Stephenson [sic]:

I thought I’d chime in here since I helped design and build these with my father, Jim Stephenson. He was a “car builder” who built custom cars in Los Angeles beginning around the mid-late 1960s. He worked at Barris Kustom, and managed George’s shop on and off, and sub-contracted building cars for George for around 20 years.

The original “Durango” was built in our own shop in Sylmar, Ca with the intention to offer it as a replacement for Ford’s “Ranchero” after that was dropped from their line. Among those who helped were my older brother, Jim, George and Katie Gowdy of G&K Fiberglass (they also did the funny car bodies for many of the famous names at that time), and George Price, a very talented “body man”, did most of the finish work on the original plugs used to make the bed molds. He was one of the best “Bondo” men in the business.

I did a lot of the metal work on the bed and I helped design and build the tailgate and the hinges. The metal work I did was used to make the plugs for the fiberglass molds for the production parts.

The tailgate turned out to be one of the toughest design issues we ran up against. There was no good way to move the taillights to the rear quarter panels because they were too narrow and it was too expensive to create an all new taillight, so we used the factory taillights in a fiberglass tailgate and had to make it swing out and away from the bed so it was level with the bed floor when opened.

When we were finished with the prototype we brought the car to “National Coach” to see if they were interested in producing it and my father cut a deal with them to buy the molds and rights to produce it and pay a royalty fee for each one sold.

The first thing National Coach did was buy a fleet of new Fairmonts from Ford, but they forgot that we’d told them that the conversion was designed to work on cars without a sunroof. The dealer they bought the cars from offered them a sweet deal on a number of cars that all had sunroofs and they purchased them without consulting with us. That was a problem for them because they pretty much blew the bulk of their budget on that deal. And since my father’s income depended on the number sold, it was a problem for him too. I was not involved in the mods made to the original bed molds to accommodate that but it almost stopped any from being produced at all. My father and brother Jim worked with National Coach to get the car into production. I was not involved much at all in that. I’d moved on to other projects by then, but I did go there to help redesign the tailgate hinges because there were some production issues that came up with what was used originally.

The Durango was the last custom car I built with my father. It’s really nice to see there are those out there who appreciate our efforts and have worked to keep the few remaining in good shape.

I don’t have a way to verify all that readily, but I’m inclined to believe it. I was able to find, on another old forum called Ranchero.us, a bunch of images of Ford Durangos in the wild and one old brochure image with National Coach Products written in the corner:

Now that you’ve got the context, let’s circle back to the Craigslist post that sent us down the rabbit hole—$11,000 for a ’79 Durango that looks pretty clean. Or as the seller puts it, “A driver but not a show car for trophies.” Fair enough. It’s effectively impossible to say what a good deal would look like on one of these since the rarity and wackiness add outsized appeal, but it would certainly get a lot more car show attention than some more expensive vehicles.

I love a mini pickup truck, but I can see why these didn’t take off. It looks like there’s a lot of fiberglass around the truck bed area, making loading sharp and heavy objects a dangerous proposition. In fact, the wall between the bed and cab also appears to be fiberglass, which is just asking for trouble. The one for sale here might have some wood flooring in place to mitigate dangers there, though.

Of the few Durangos built—and claims across those forum threads seem to vary between under 100 and 300—there can’t be many that have survived. So it’s pretty cool to see one pop up for sale.