Cars Motoring news
The new Ford Ranger, due for release in about 11 months' time, will be built in only three factories - Ford SA's Silverton, Pretoria, plant, Ford's Asia-Pacific facility in Thailand, and the Buenos Aires factory in Argentina - but it will be sold in no fewer than 180 countries.
What's more, two of the models will be fitted with Puma engines made in Port Elizabeth, one of them a powerful 3,2-litre 5-cylinder diesel producing no less than 147 kW of power and 470 Nm of torque, making it the most powerful in its segment.
The new Ranger was newly-designed from the wheels up, and according to development engineers we spoke to at the world launch in Sydney, Australia, contains less than a "bucketful" of parts from the outgoing model.
Most of the development and design of the new Ranger took place from Australia's design and development facility in Melbourne, Australia, but Ford's Asia-Pacific engineering director Jim Baumbick told us that for the first time Ford's global engineering expertise had been integrated into a single project.
Simultaneously with the Ranger project many of the same designers and engineers worked on the successful implementation of the Ford Viga small car manufactured in India and recently introduced into South Africa.
The new Ranger is longer, wider and taller than the outgoing model, and takes a completely new design direction from the previous "kinetic" style of the previous version, though some aspects of kinetic design are retained from certain angles.
Measuring 1 549 mm long, 511 mm high and with a maximum cargo width of 1 560 mm, the cargo box of the double cab is more than 100 mm wider than that of the current model, and 90 mm longer. Volume is an impressive 1.21 cu m.
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