Sajeev can breathe a sigh of relief. The Detroit News reports that the Blue Oval Boyz are considering offering the Ranger demi-pickup for two more years. Originally slated for the scrapheap in 2009, along with the Twin Cities Assembly Plant, the new plan puts a hold on the factory closure and extends production of the market's most fuel-efficient compact truck to 2011. That's when the "global" Ranger model hits the streets. Of course, Ford will neither confirm nor deny the reports. Spokesman Said Deep: "We do not discuss future product plans for fear we'll have to change our minds again competitive reasons." FoMoCo will build the global Ranger outside of the U.S. South Africa gets the nod, exempt as it is from the "chicken tax" on imported pickups. Now if they'd just start marketing the Ranger (when was the last time you saw a commercial for one?), they might just have a hit truck on their hands. You know; relatively speaking.
Find Reviews by Make:
Read all comments
Sweeeeeeet.
Marketing America’s most fuel efficient truck is a good idea right now, but they need some product on the ground to sell. Rangers are hard to come by, unlike the blizzard of F150s clogging lot after lot.
My parents recently bought an ’04 Ranger used. It has the V6 and a 5 speed manual. I drove it recently, and it wasn’t bad except for the dashboard that takes you back to the 80s. I think it would be wise for Ford to keep it in production, especially with the 4 cylinder engine. Even though it’s dated, it’s the last small pickup out there and will likely help them until the new one appears.
Refresh the interior and maximize the fuel-efficiency and this would be good for a while. People will actually use trucks as haulers and not daily drivers. They do not have to be super modern or luxurious.
The Focus proved that an update of an old but fuel efficient vehicle can work for Ford. The buzz around the Mahindra & Mahidra pickup may have helped them make this decision.
4 cylinder manuals get high 20’s mpg on the highway, and some people claim to get 30+ mpg on newer ones with that combo. I agree with Sajeev, market the mpgs!
I think had they kept it more fresh/more refined/ADVERTISED the past decade, it’d currently be in top 10 sales, like I believe it used to be.
Good on Ford! I have a ’94 Ranger XLT Super Cab 4WD (4.0 V6) that I was going to sell when I got a newer vehicle to tow our livestock trailer… but the darn thing was just so useful for everything I couldn’t part with it. I believe the current model is considerably dated but with the fuel prices and all there must be lots of folks that could use the smaller size. Although I will say the 4.0 V6 in mine will only get around 18 mpg or so, about the same as my full size Club Wagon van with the 5.0 V8.
RayH :
I can get very close to 27mpg in my 2006 Frontier XE (4cyl/5speed). With the Ranger’s slightly smaller motor and lighter weight, I can easily imagine someone achieving 30mpg in one.
I’m happy to see Ford keeping the Ranger on. If they could update it while keeping size/weight in check it could be a huge hit given there’s really no truck left in that class now that most of the compacts have gone “mid-sized”.
That’s good to hear! Just upgrade with a new dashboard and non-electronic transfer case for 4wd models.
Great! Now why don’t you update it a little bit, not an all new design or anything just make it look different than the same thing we have been looking at for the last 10 years. You should have taken the F-150’s wasted update budget and put a little into the Ranger to spruce it up rather than letting it languish while claiming there is no market for small trucks.
I have a pretty good idea of how big cars should be and how much they should weigh. But, not being a truck guy, my sense does not embrace trucks.
I am pretty sure that the current generation of full-size pick-ups is a lot bigger than their ancestors were 20 or 30 years ago. Does anybody know how much bigger? Does the size increase enhance utility or is it just blubber?
How small can a small pick-up be and still be usefull?
Should pick-ups be more routinely be equiuped with diesel engines?
as a customs broker, I just looked into the Harmonized Tariff Schedule to see if South Africa was really exempt, as I wasn’t aware of that. Turns out it looks as if it may be covered under the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which does have an exemption, and covers many African countries. Other countries exempt from the tax with a potential as a production site include Australia, Chile, Morocco, and of course Mexico/Canada.
Are any of these countries really that much lower cost than a non-union US factory? Get away from the union and ship jobs south…to the southern US. Why can’t they consider that? Is it because the UAW is organizationally entrenched within Ford’s domestic ops, rather than geographically?
Sorry for the dupe.
This is a good decision. A small fuel efficient pickup is perfect in this environment.
Robert Schwartz you will get your answer to the question if you just look at the size of fullsize and small trucks from say the 80’s, plenty of people got by fine with that size, great utility and a lot less weight. The current trend of supersize trucks is just an image thing for people who rarely use their truck for what it was intended, if anything having a truck too high is more a pain in the ass, 6 more inches to have to lift things into the bed.
I’m kind of glad these high gas prices will be pushing things back to a normal size and weight. Maybe we will quit wasting so many resources and space for no real reason.
Redbarchetta: me too on the error. That is why I duped the comment above.
PS you are, no doubt, correct about sizes, but I am looking for more quantitative info.
I just bought a 1996 for $600 to use as my Home Depot truck. 4 cyl, 5 speed manual, no air, no PW, just a plain old truck. I like it so much I drive it to work a couple of days a week.
Outside of the rust, it looks just like a new one!
Safety. Just add some active safety systems. It’s a decent truck, but the crash performance is awful. Anything that could bolster performance (or keep you out of an accident in the first place) would probably work.
Ford: stability control, side airbags, better seats. That’s it.
Cheap, cheerful, compact, capable and frugal.
The Ranger is worth keeping around and refining afterall.
NN, the way unions usually work is that if a union company hires non-union labor, all the union workers go on strike. They have to, for the whole union thing to work.
Those factories wouldn’t be that much cheaper, anyway. The transplants had to keep wages close to keep their factories from unionizing… it was the lack of retiree costs that made the difference.
The current Ranger is a POS. The concept of the Ranger (simple, small, cheap, fuel efficient), however, is a very good one.
Well, it’s more complex than just adding some airbags. The Ranger’s engines are all set to be killed off late this year or middle of next. They would have to replace the engines (the 2.3 to the 2.5 would be fairly easy, but the 4.0?) and possibly update other parts of the drivetrain. Either that or produce a run of them sepcifically for production through 2011, which could cost Ford a lot of money they shouldn’t be spending.
They put the 2.5L in the Ranger in 1998 for a couple of years. It was a peppy little motor for only being rated at about 115hp and fairly high tech (8 plugs). I had a 4cyl 5 speed. It was great, the only negative was there is no room inside them. Without a crew cab model the appeal is limited to people that need a hauler. I got about 28mpg in it and never had a problem with it. After getting married I sold it to my cousin who still drives it. Over 200,000 miles and still no problems. The frame and interior is old and cheap, but for $12,000 what do you expect?
Good point about the 4.0L, but there’s a question as to whether it’s even needed, what with the F150’s price dropping like a stone and upcoming F100.
If I recall, the six-cyl Ranger didn’t get very good gas mileage next to the V8 F-150. The four-cyl model, though, certainly did.
Is the 4.0 V6 in the Ranger the same engine in the Mustang? Why not replace it with whatever is replacing the Mustang V6 or is that engine staying in the Mustang forever. I know replacing it with the new 3.5 would require some engineering but its a better engine they could charge a little more for.
There’s no need for a V6 Ranger if the F-100 really happens. But I expect that project will hit the skids and they’ll need a stopgap.
Ford needs to invest in a Duratec V6 (3.0L and 3.5L) for the Ranger, but there’s probably several reasons (Unions, etc) why the Vulcan and Cologne V6s are still in production.
@Robert Schwartz
In the 1980’s a buddy and me would pack up his 6-cyl 3 spd manual Chevy C10 with his welder and a bunch of other tools THEN we would hitch up the trailer with our ‘street-stock’ (i.e., mildly hot-rodded street car equipped for duty on 1/4 mile dirt track) 1970’s era Chrysler products (i.e., HUGE freakin’ sedans) and go to the race track every weekend.
Granted, we didn’t exactly burn up the roads in such a heavily (and possibly illegally) loaded rig, but we got there.
I saw one of those old C10’s next to a new-body Ford F150 in a parking lot the other day, and was amazed at how huge the standard pickup truck has become.
In addition I had a Dodge Dakota for a while, which for the average homeowner is way more truck than they could (really) use. A 4-cyl truck the size of a Ranger or S-10 is a good size for the non-tradesman.
In a way I’m glad that Ford will keep the current Ranger going. It wasn’t always the best of the minis, but at least there will be an alternative to the ‘monster’ truck syndrome, at least for a while.
@kericf: The 2.3l replacement (the 2.5l) is not the same one as what you had. This is basically a larger and more refined version of the current 2.3l (DHE-423 or MZR23). It’s what is/will be found in the Escape triplets, Fusion triplets, Mazda 3 and 6, and a few others.
I actually think that with the new 2.5l jump in power, it will be perfectly suited for the truck. It offers similiar power to the Vulcan 3.0l V6 with a bit better fuel economy.
The new mid-size offerings are the old full-size offerings…I gather.
Another good call by Ford. They are by far the most likely to survive amongst the big 3.
I had the Mazda Clone (B2300) of the Ranger before my KJ. With the 2.3L 4 and five speed I got 24-28mpg.
With hard core hyper-mileing it could likely get into the 30s.
It was cheap, ~$13k out the door in 2002.
Downsides were poor ergonomics and lack of cab room in the regular cab. It was ok for around town and comuting but just torture on any driver longer than 1hr.
The RWD was just awful in the Snow with no weight on the drives.
With yet another mild update and throw in a Duratorq Diesel from Europe and you have a direct competitor for the Mahandra pickup.
I know I’ll probably be shouted down for this again, but I can’t resist. I still maintain that the ranger is not that last true compact pickup. The 2wd reg cab tacoma is close enough for me to consider still fitting into that segment.
Here’s the side by side on edmunds
edmunds.com
personally, the extra 170 lbs and 1mpg less city/hwy is an ok trade for the extra hp of the toyota 2.7l. MSRP on the taco is actually a little less too, not that I believe anyone is paying msrp on the ranger.
edit: oh yeah, and I do agree that ford needs to keep it around until they have something better to replace it with. Anyone have the sales numbers for it this year? Unless they aren’t selling any it seems silly to just dump it completely.
When the current Ranger hit the streets there wasn’t an internet. Hell there wasn’t even a Windows 3.1!
I picked this up from another article on the same topic:
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080625/ford_plant.html?.v=3
“Ford Chief Executive Alan Mulally indicated in a May 22 conference call that the company would increase Ranger production and was thinking about smaller trucks now built in other countries.
“As you know, we’re extending the Ranger production also, and we also have some tremendous Ranger-size vehicles around the world. So another thing we are thinking about is — what does that market look like in the United States?” he said. ‘But clearly having a range of fuel-efficient different-size pickups is going to be important to our plan going forward. We’re sorting that out as we go here.\'”
Wow, sometimes Alan sounds like an overpaid CEO who at least has a clue.
My request to Ford would be to bring back the Ranger’s four cylinder 4wd option. Gear it to get decent mileage and promote it in snow country. It wouldn’t be fast, but it would be a very useful vehicle in this part of the world.
Robert Schwartz :
June 25th, 2008 at 11:24 am
I have a pretty good idea of how big cars should be and how much they should weigh. But, not being a truck guy, my sense does not embrace trucks.
How small can a small pick-up be and still be usefull?
For me, I’d like one to carry fishing gear in, and maybe a Christmas tree or other big but lightweight stuff. I’d say it depends mostly on the bed’s size, less on towing and hauling capacities.
Six feet is a good size for a bed. With camper shell or tent for the bed, it can sleep two, it’s the same length as an open-faced fishing rod and it’s big enough for Christmas trees, camping gear, skis, and other long items.
As for the Ranger: Better engine and a larger extended cab would work for me. Of course, if they can make a 4 x 4 four-cylinder Ranger do 21 mpg on the EPA driving cycle I’d buy one even with current interior. They need to offer the four-door extended cab model with the four cylinder engine.
I know I’ll probably be shouted down for this again, but I can’t resist. I still maintain that the ranger is not that last true compact pickup. The 2wd reg cab tacoma is close enough for me to consider still fitting into that segment.
Here’s the side by side on edmunds
edmunds.com
The 2wd Tacoma Access Cab, if its new rear seats have enough room to seat a five-foot-nine person, would be my choice for a truck. For me, “comfort” is being able to sit in the back without having your legs rub up against the front seat, and considering the Tacoma is bigger than a T100 I don’t think it’s too much to ask for the rear seats to be comparable with the Dodge Dakota. They look OK to me. Regarding size, the issue with most Tacomas’ size is the PreRunner trim (the fact it’s T100 sized is also not a good thing). Put the fender flares on and add a couple inches of ground clearance and it looks and feels like you’re driving a full size. It’s the few inches. But, your comment about the 2.7 liter is apt. I just wish the truck would use its size more effectively.
From time to time I’ve thought about getting a Ranger. One of the things that’s kept me from doing it is the seats. I do long road trips. The Rangers I’ve been in…don’t. Maybe the bucket seats are better, but the bench seats are pretty bad.