We have Ford to thank for the new truck emoji

iPhone users might be surprised to find a new emoji in their keyboards following an update to iOS 14 firmware, after Apple added its rendition of a pick-up truck to the 3000-strong catalogue of emojis.

Along with a raft of changes brought about by Apple’s latest iOS 14 update, the automotive world will no longer have to get inventive with how they describe a truck when words fail.

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Interestingly, it turns out that Ford was the brains behind the operation, which explains why the emoji looks closer to an F-150 truck than any other.

Following a failed bid to get a Ford truck as the official Apple truck emoji years earlier, this time Ford secretly campaigned the Unicode Consortium (which dictates the industry standard for Unicode characterisations) via a third-party marketing agency to get the emoji into Apple's catalogue.

In fact, during development of the project 12 months ago, Ford US's director of marketing Matt VanDyke told The Atlantic that they designed the navy blue rendition to look like a mix between 'our' Ranger and the F-150 sold in North America.

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“We kind of tried to make it look like it could be both,” VanDyke said. “Even most of our pickups are sold as double-cab pickups, but the traditional iconography of pickups is single cab. So we tried to stay true to that."

The latest push sneakily didn’t include the Ford logo anywhere on the application, though we can see in the rendered product that there are some similarities between the Ford's utes and Apple’s newest emoji.

The same body creases are included down the side, similarly shaped front-and taillights and, of course, the shape of the front window is a dead-ringer for America’s most popular truck. No need to try and translate emoji meanings here.

It’s somewhat of an oddity that there wasn’t one already, considering we currently have a tuk-tuk, a hot hatch, a regular hatch, a bus, a van, a fire truck and a tractor among others.

Nonetheless, Ford’s pretty proud of the outcome having released a cute video detailing the ‘making of’.

We give the new truck emoji a laughing emoji combined with a heart emoji and a thumbs-up emoji - no poop emoji here! Wait... is that not how emojis work?

Do you think the emoji resembles the Ford Ranger or is it closer to the Ford F-150? Let us know in the comments below!