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Rick has spent fifteen years with one foot in the shop and one foot in the driver's seat — half-ton, three-quarter-ton, diesel, gas, lifted, stock. He'd rather tell you what broke at 80,000 miles than what the press kit promised.
Rick France is the senior automotive editor at Car and Truck, where he leads coverage of full-size and mid-size pickups, towing equipment, and off-road gear. He has been around trucks for as long as he can remember — his first vehicle was a hand-me-down 1994 Chevy K1500 with 220,000 miles on the odometer and a leaky rear main, and he has been buying, selling, fixing, and arguing about trucks ever since.
Before moving into editorial work full-time, Rick spent a decade in working garages — first as a line technician, later as a shop foreman. He earned multiple ASE certifications during that stretch (A-series, including A4, A5, A6, and A9 for light-duty diesel) and racked up enough warranty work on three generations of half-ton trucks to develop strong opinions about which parts of the brochure to trust and which to ignore. He carries those opinions into every review.
Rick's current daily is a high-mileage three-quarter-ton diesel that he uses to tow a 32-foot travel trailer several thousand miles a year. He has also owned, at various points, a stripped-down work-spec half-ton (manual transmission, vinyl floors, crank windows — "the way trucks should be"), a mid-size pickup he kept for 180,000 miles, and a heavily modified 1980s Wagoneer that he restored on weekends over five years and finally sold to fund his kid's college tuition. He still regrets selling the Wagoneer.
For every product Rick recommends, he runs the same five checks: published specifications compared against independent sources, warranty terms read end to end (especially the exclusions), recent verified owner reviews skimmed for repeat failure modes, fitment confirmed across the year/make/model ranges claimed by the manufacturer, and — whenever the product category allows — cross-referenced against his own decade of garage experience installing and servicing similar gear. When he hasn't personally used a product, he says so plainly in the review.
Rick does not accept free product, sponsored placements, or paid review slots, and the editorial team operates under a strict separation between affiliate revenue and recommendation logic. If a product earns a top spot in one of Rick's guides, it is because of the product — not the commission rate. When a product Rick previously recommended develops a reliability pattern in owner feedback, the guide gets revised; he would rather update an old review than defend a stale one.
Rick reads every reader email, and he's especially interested in long-term ownership reports — the kind of stories that don't show up in any press release. If you have spent real time with a truck or piece of gear and want to share what worked or didn't, he wants to hear it.
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