Ford designs a pickup truck emoji, petitions Unicode Consortium

Enlarge (credit: Ford)

Did you know that July 17 is World Emoji Day? No, me neither—at least not until Ford used the celebration of these 21st century hieroglyphs to announce that it wants a pickup truck emoji. In fact, Ford was so serious about the idea that in 2018, it submitted an official proposal to the Unicode Consortium to make that happen. On Wednesday, it revealed that the little blue truck had made it as far as the short list for inclusion in the next official emoji update, which is scheduled for 2020.

“When customers started demanding a truck emoji, we knew we had to help make it happen,” said Joe Hinrichs, Ford’s president of automotive. “Given the popularity of Ford trucks globally, there’s no one better than Ford to help bring an all-new pickup truck emoji to hard-working texters around the globe.”

The emoji as proposed by Ford is unmistakable as a pickup truck, but it’s generic enough to work for any make or model of pickup. (Although, as the cheeseburger emoji scandal of 2017 proved, that might not stop some app or OS team from implementing their version with the wheels on the top, or the load bed out front of the cab.)