2010 Ford Ranger Truck Review

With Fords like the new Focus and Fiesta hitting our shores, Top Brass obviously thought that a change was due for the Ford Ranger truck, and so we have the restyled version you see here. It apparently features Ford's 'Kinetic' design, which is a bit like Ford's old 'new edge' but has fewer edges and one less word in the marketing tag line.

To that end the new Ranger has a restyled front and rear end in an attempt to make it look more like a 'Ford'. The problem is that the Ranger is supposed to be 'built tough' and the restyle makes the Ranger look a little more like someone who has just discovered what the word 'metrosexual' means.

What we have here is styling that makes the ute look less butch than the last model, which is a debatable way to go.

What isn't debatable though is that while the styling has come from 'Queer eye for the straight guy', the underpinnings have come from an armoured car.

A day spent high in the hills near Mount Cook proved that the Ranger is still as utilitarian and bullet-proof as the last; especially the way my co-driver and I were handling it. At one stage we decided to forgo the actual track and head off across the scrubby bush, often leaving the ground for a few minutes. The Ranger squeaked a bit as its chassis interacted with the body, but other than that it was clear sailing.

On the road the Ranger handles pretty well, albeit not quite as well as a Toyota Hilux, while on gravel the Ranger proves to be very stable, and indeed you can play around with the chassis and get it sliding sideways very comfortably.

Anyway, here's the upshot. You can have your Ranger in any form from the basic single cab chassis to the completely over the top new Wildtrak, complete with roller deck cover, roll bars, leather and Alcantara interior and surprisingly complicated tailgate locking system (Ford had to email all the journos a diagram to show us how the straps work).

Inside all the Rangers you have an auxiliary port for your MP3 player, which is good and that same old pull-out umbrella-style handbrake which is very, very bad. Even Ford staff agree that this is a very stupid thing, but it comes from the factory like that and there's not much they can do about it. I tend to use the handbrake whenever I'm stopped at the lights, but in the ranger that's pretty much impossible.

Engine wise you have the choice of two powerplants, the 105kW/330Nm 2.5-litre diesel or the 115kW/380Nm 3.0-litre diesel. Both are up slightly on power and you can have a five speed manual on the lesser models, with a five speed auto on the double cab XLT and the Wildtrak.

The new Ranger is really not much more than a mild revamp of the outgoing model, but Ford readily admits it was more to make the vehicle fit in with the rest of the styling, even if 'kinetic' design is getting rather hard to define.