Home on the Ranger

Recently, while on a car dealership lot, I noticed that brand-new Ford Ranger pickups were being sold for under $13,000 CDN. I think this is quite impressive. You can get a Nissan Versa, or a Kia, for that kind of money, but not much else. Not for a moment will I pretend to know much about trucks, but I do know that, regardless of the fact that the Ranger's running gear has been around since the early nineties, $13 large is a bargain for a new pickup.

I imagine part of the reason the Rangers I saw were so cheap was because the were fairly basic models. Perhaps they had manual gearboxes, wind-down windows, and no CD players. I don't have an issue with this. If I were to go out and buy a truck, I would want a no-nonsense workhorse. No Lincoln Mark LT for me, thank you. When you're out in a field or hauling two-by-fours back to your cabin, you're doing work. You don't need leather seats, or GPS, or a moonroof, or satellite radio. You need simple, hard-to-kill, honest to God engineering.

The original Range Rover was a simple vehicle. It was great for serious off-roading, as were early Jeeps. Land Rover in particular has gotten rather decadent over the years, to the point that you can now get a Range Rover that costs more than an S-Class and has as much standard technology as the USS Enterprise. This doesn't mean the new Range Rovers aren't awesome SUVs. If they weren't, people wouldn't buy them. They aren't as utilitarian as their predecessors, however, and, as a result, most latter-day Rovah' buyers would never take their beloved HSE Sport down the Rubicon trail. Similarly, I doubt there's a Lincoln Mark LT out there that has ever hauled around a load of gravel in its bed.

Due to the wear and tear a truck takes, it should be simple and easy to fix. No paddle shifters or eLSD systems here. This is where I find the Ranger most appealing. Sure, it hasn't changed to much since 1995, but that's okay. It's simple and basic and tough. It could pull any small load I threw at it, and could carry around a chest of drawers or a couch or a dead cow if I wanted it to. If a wing mirror got snapped off by a tree trunk, I wouldn't care, because my Ranger wouldn't have set me back $50,000 at the dealership. Sure, I wouldn't have a CD player, but I could always use a radio transmitter on my iPod, which would give me access to 4 or 5 thousand songs, rather than the 2o tracks or so you can get on the average Bon Jovi album. If it got too hot, I'd roll down the window and get some exercise in the process. No harm done there, and the environment's better off without A/C anyway.

Sadly, Ford has been talking for a while about killing off the Ranger. This is unfortunate, because not only is the F-150 a much more expensive truck, I is also loaded up with more chrome than a casino in Vegas. Most big pickups I see have xenon headlights and leather interior seating and the kind of alloy wheels you'd expect to find on an Audi S6. They're not vehicles you'd want to take into the back forty. Neither would you want a deceased cow in the bed of your $40,000 Silverado. I mean, would you want a dead cow in your $40,000 C-Class? No, neither would I.

I know the Ranger is smaller than the big trucks. I know it has less torque and a smaller engine and that it can't carry half the population of Wyoming in its cab. That doesn't really faze me. A truck should be designed for grunt work. For moving stuff around, and for pulling out old tree stumps. The truck industry needs to go back to the basics. I'm not going to be buying a truck any time soon, but if I am ever in the market for one, I'll be looking for something cheap and indestructible. Like the Rangers I saw for sale the other day. I doubt I'm alone with that sentiment. The automakers should keep that in mind.