Ah, the Ford F-150. The darling of the bunch for decades running. With a seemingly perfect combination of versatility, value and brand cache, the F-150 has kept its place high atop the pickup truck mountain with pluck and guile befitting a boxer in a beige tinted movie. Through thick (steel) and thin (aluminum), the F series has soldiered on as the sales titan of the Dearborn line with numbers that would make a cherry blush: Ford is predicting 2018 will be the best year for the model since 2004 with 450,000 units sold from January to June. That’s one new truck sold every 35 seconds. For comparison, in 2017, the entire Jaguar/Land Rover line sold a grand total of 114,333 vehicles in the Americas.
So why bring back the Ford Ranger, now?
It is a pickle. Why try to clone the golden goose? It almost seems greedy. The Ranger was phased out of the American market in 2011, and with this cash cow F-150 just walking off the dealer lots, why would the folks at Ford want to look the gift horse squarely in the mouth?
The simple answer is this: it’ll sell. The truck market in America is very different from what it was in 2011, lower gas prices mean consumers aren’t as worried about pain at the pump, and GM has a head start with the Chevy Colorado and GMC Canyon.
The longer answer has more to do with the American love affair with the pickup truck. The Ranger was Ford’s first entry into the niche mini truck market in 1983, and it appeared just as trucks were transitioning from utilitarian farm implements to urban cowboy street machines. It was cheap, easy to modify, and served as the basis for other legendary vehicles like the Bronco II. But more than that, the Ranger had something plucky and just so…American about it. The most common engine was a 2.3 liter four cylinder pumping out all of 79 horsepower, so it certainly wasn’t fast, but it was versatile, youthful, and a sales smash. In 1987, Ford sold over 300,000 Rangers.
But the years flew by and the pounds packed on. The original Ranger weighed a light 2,750 lbs while the last model built on American shores weighed as much as 3,700 lbs, and a truck doesn’t slice through the air neatly to begin with. As gas prices climbed ever higher after the financial crisis of ‘08, people traded their trucks for hybrids and hatches, sales slumped and Ford pulled it from the American market. But the Ranger never disappeared. It’s been sold in South America, Asia and Europe non-stop since 1995, and Ford Australia took over production after the last model rolled off the Louisville assembly lines in 2011.
Here we are over 7 years later and the glut of petroleum brought to market through new technologies like fracking means we’re seeing supercharged V8s making more power than ever before and F-150s sold every minute or so. The Ranger will sell like sunblock in summer. With the 2019 model on sale soon and the new Bronco to follow, Ford is throwing some real weight behind the decision to pull out of the American sedan market. Let’s hope the new Ranger lives up to its name.