2025 Ford F-350 Platinum Plus Review: So This Is What Six Figures Gets You
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Over the past two model years, Ford's truck marketers pulled a subtle switcheroo right before our eyes. After carrying the banner for the company's range-topping truck models, the Limited trim was officially put out to pasture, paving the way for a new, two-tiered nomenclature. All hail Platinum, and its new superior, Platinum Plus.
On paper, it adds just $6,500 to the 2025 F-350's purchase price, but if you peep the fine print, you'll notice that the high-output diesel (500 horsepower; 1,200 lb-ft of torque) is a mandatory inclusion with Platinum Plus—as is virtually everything else, including four-wheel drive. Our test truck's window sticker showed $27,820 in optional equipment, and $19,495 of that was mandatory with Platinum Plus. You can drive the price up even further with more accessories, but at this point, you've basically run out of packages to throw at it.
Outside, the Platinum Plus gets a unique satin exterior trim finish, its own special set of 20-inch wheels, and a handful of popular add-ons, including the 2-kW version of Ford's Pro Power Onboard generator and a twin-panel power sunroof.
The interior lacks the panache you get from a Lincoln, but the materials are impressive for a dually. There's French-stitched leather on the seats, doors, and dash; even the grab handles feature cowhide. The A-pillars contrast that with suede interior trim.
There's only one color option for the cabin so far—the 'Smoked Truffle' brown shown here—and it's a welcoming shade that might even hide a little workday grime, should you be inclined to get your Super Duty dirty. And that's precisely what I intended to do, after reassuring Ford multiple times that I would return it no worse for wear.
I can forgive Ford for being a bit precious about its six-figure land yacht. After all, most auto journos aren't really truck people, so there's always the chance that we vastly overestimate the truck (or ourselves), the results of which can range from cringey to disastrous. But when in doubt, there's always yard work.
The running joke among those of us who do this sort of thing for a living is that we inevitably use press trucks to buy mulch. Like a moth to a flame (or perhaps more appropriately, a scribe to a shrimp buffet), I was on the phone to my local landscaping supplier before I'd even finished scheduling the loan.
To be fair, it's a fairly simple and consistent test, and apart from towing a lawn mower, one of the few real-world uses people can commonly relate to. A cubic yard of it weighs between a quarter and half a ton—handily similar to the way payload capacities are marketed—and you can get it just about anywhere. And unlike some other easily sourced bulk materials, it's not likely to beat the hell out of a truck bed.
Trope — 1
Byron — 0
Two things, though. For starters, this isn't some work-truck-spec pickup with a hose-down interior. This is a $100,000 luxury model with high-quality leather and nice, carpeted floor mats. Bulk mulch is just decomposing wood, and while it may not ding the paint, it can certainly make a mess.
And the second thing? Well, this an F-350 dually. Eight foot bed or not, to overload this thing with mulch, it would have to be mixed with molten lead. So while the visuals may be satisfying, it's not all that much of a test. But hey, I was committed.
With two yards in the bed, I fired up the Super Duty's Onboard Scales app to see how much of its 4,947-pound payload capacity I'd eaten up. It showed about 30%, or somewhere between 1,500 and 1,700 pounds. I could have fit another yard in there with the tarp to account for it mounding above the bed line, but another ~800 pounds will only just get me halfway to the F-350's capacity. If I was going to push this truck to its limit, I'd need something far more substantial.
I pondered that on my brief drive home. Even with the bed tarped, I opted for side streets, stretching the one-and-a-half-mile trip from its usual three minutes to a leisurely five. My house is nestled in the urban-adjacent grid of Detroit's inner suburbs, and the F-350 feels conspicuously wide on most of these two-lanes.
With just shy of half an acre, I have more room to maneuver than most of my neighbors, but even that isn't quite enough for the Super Duty. This thing is just big—more than 22 feet long and nearly nine feet wide at the mirrors—and while rear-wheel drive typically allows trucks a tighter turning circle than their length might otherwise suggest, the dual-wheel rear axle throws that whole notion right out the window. Maneuvering this thing is a deliberate process, especially if you're trying to avoid digging huge divots in your grass.
Fortunately, Ford offers some quality-of-life features that make it a bit less nerve-racking. Loaded as it is, the Platinum Plus comes with Ford's 360-degree camera system, which earned its keep beautifully as I threaded the truck around freshly planted landscaping. And suddenly, right there in the infotainment screen, the perfect payload test appeared.
You might say it hit me like a ton of bricks, but technically, it was more than two tons. This pallet of solid 8x4x16 concrete blocks was generously left behind by my home's previous custodian. I've tried to foist them off on neighbors and random internet landscapers more than once, but in the end, it's always the same story: they're just too heavy to be worth the trouble.
There are 138 of them in there, each weighing approximately 33 pounds dry. Bumping that up by a pound to allow for the fact that many near the bottom were borderline waterlogged, we get a total of just under 4,700 pounds—way too much for a typical utility trailer, but still almost 250 pounds short of the F-350's ultimate capacity.
Bingo.
On paper, the truck can do it. But there's just one problem: I have to load them in there somehow, and unlike mulch, concrete blocks will indeed beat up a truck bed. With the tarp still in place, I put down a piece of scrap 4×8 plywood to protect the bed and tailgate, then set about loading nearly 150 solid blocks of concrete into the back of the Super Duty, by hand, one by one. I was careful not to let any of them careen into the wheel arches as I muscled them into place, periodically checking in with Onboard Scales to make sure everything was going to plan. It was.
Just over an hour and a couple of bottles of water later, I had successfully loaded the full pallet into the F-350. Pulling up Onboard Scales, I saw that my math was overly conservative. Even adjusting for the fact that I never corrected the 150-pound passenger offset to reflect my own healthy curb weight, we had at least a few hundred pounds of headroom.
After unloading the concrete, I gave the F-350 a thorough hose-down, and was again struck by its size. The bed alone is big enough to have its own zip code, and at five-foot-eight, I often had to use the various steps and other accessibility features just to see far enough into the bed to confirm I was actually spraying the thing I intended to spray.
While stretching sore muscles, I caught myself eyeballing the rough framing of what will eventually become my new garage, and was reminded that I have Ford to thank for helping me plan it in the first place.
Since my township puts a hard cap on the allowed square footage for a private garage, I faced a difficult design decision: Did I want a three-car garage deep enough to fit most typical passenger cars, or did I want a two-car garage deep enough to fit literally anything? And when it came time to define 'literally anything,' I used the Super Duty's dimensions as the bare minimum.
As you can see, quantity won out in the end. Hey, we're a four-car household. Something's gotta give. Still, I was curious.
I had to keep the Super Duty's massive side mirrors deployed so I could guide the nearly equally wide rear fenders between the posts at the far side. See, this slab is only 22 feet deep. I already know the F-350 is too long to fit between its future walls, but the mirrors should clear the rough framing of the nine-foot door openings. And they did, at their innermost position, with less than half an inch of breathing room on either side. Phew.
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Awkward though it may be at times, it's really easy to love the Super Duty in this environment. Heck, I got more work done in the three days I spent in the yard with that Ford than I did in three weeks of man-powered cleanup last fall. It's like a near-infinite force multiplier; the more you throw at it, the more effortless it makes it seem.
But elsewhere, this comes at a cost—literally, considering it will set you back six figures—but also figuratively. A lot of urban parking options are simply off-limits to a truck this big, and even some venues that are accustomed to truck traffic can't accommodate something of this size. My local nursery, which is set up to serve shoppers buying pallets of bagged landscaping materials, didn't have parking spots long enough to fit the Super Duty.
And then there's the cabin. Hoo-boy, is it nice. It's still somewhat incongruous to open the door of a heavy-duty pickup truck and see the sort of interior you'd expect in a well-equipped Expedition, but it certainly pampers.
If you're looking for a supple ride, we'd steer you toward a single-rear-wheel model without the FX4 package. The off-road dually is borderline skittish on rough surfaces, and downright unpleasant on broken ones. The stump-pulling torque of the high-output Power Stroke can also easily overpower the rear axle from a stop while the bed's unloaded, which saps most of the potential fun out of that big diesel's torque figure.
That said, it's really hard to complain about this thing, but for this kinda scratch, that should darn well be the case. If you'd like some nits picked, the absence of BlueCruise is conspicuous at this price point. Self-driving-adjacent tech really isn't my cup of tea, personally, but losing that option in the upgrade from F-150 to Super Duty still stings. And like GM's Super Cruise, it's actually good at what it does.
Being good at things is kind of the whole point of a Super Duty. Heavy-duty pickups have developed a bit of a blue-collar-BMW reputation of late, and Platinum Plus certainly won't do anything to change that perception, but for trucks like this, the cachet is all in the capability. Like a Bentley or Rolls-Royce, a high-end truck doesn't actually need to prove anything. It's the capability that counts.
And going back to the subject of GM, we can't help but sniff a bit of Denali/Denali Ultimate in Ford's new two-tiered strategy. The two years of included maintenance is certainly a nice perk, and it even comes with direct, one-to-one texting support for your vehicle. Need help with something? Just reach out. And every Platinum Plus comes with a little gift welcoming you to the Ford Family—a nice little engraved cedar box with some additional literature and a branded cloth for cleaning the F-350's enormous screen.
I may not quite be sold on six-figure pickup trucks, but if there's any consolation here, it's the fact that a truck like this can do just about anything. Five-thousand pounds in the bed is nothing to sneeze at, and with a different axle (this one came with 3:55s), you can put a 35,900-pound load behind this thing—you need the F-450 (Platinum Plus starting at $103,535) to do measurably better. That's nuts . But then again, so is this truck's $111,000 price tag. 2025 Ford F-350 Platinum Plus Specs Base Price (as tested) $81,395 ($111,310) Powertrain 6.7-liter diesel V8 | 10-speed automatic | 4-wheel drive Horsepower 500 Torque 1,200 lb-ft Seating Capacity 5 Max Towing 31,800 pounds
(35,900 pounds with 4.10:1 rear axle) Max Payload 4,947 pounds Bed Length 8 ft Score 8/10
A ridiculous truck with a ridiculous price and go-anywhere, do-anything utility. I'll pass on the dually, though, thanks.
Got tips? Send 'em in to: tips@thedrive.com
Byron is one of those weird car people who has never owned an automatic transmission. Born in the DMV but Midwestern at heart, he lives outside of Detroit with his wife, two cats, a Miata, a Wrangler, and a Blackwing.
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