The Ford Ranger: A Truck with a Lot to Say, but Not Enough to Impress

As I sat behind the wheel of the Ford Ranger, I couldn't help but feel like I was driving a car that was almost, but not quite, ready for primetime. The transmission and drivetrain are a major source of frustration, with too much carryover from other vehicles making it feel like a wheel is out of balance. This results in an unpleasant vibration that can be felt throughout the truck, even when cruising at moderate speeds. It's like driving a car with a bent wheel - you know what I mean.

This problem is particularly noticeable when the truck is stuck in a low gear, as this creates a situation where the engine is not spinning up quickly enough, leading to a grinding noise that can be quite uncomfortable. The start-stop system only makes things worse, creating an almost constant vibration that's just annoying. It's like the truck is trying to tell you something - "Hey, I'm not exactly thrilled about this drivetrain setup." The fact that this problem persists even when driving at higher speeds means that the Ranger simply can't compete with its competitors in terms of smoothness and refinement.

One area where the Ranger does shine is in its off-road capabilities. With the Tremor package, which adds skid plates, decent off-road suspension, great ride height and ground clearance, you get a lot for your money. It's like having an SUV, without sacrificing too much towing capability. However, this comes at the cost of some compromises on the road. The ride can be a bit rough, and the tires are noisier than they should be.

But let's not forget about the interior, which is where the Ranger really falls short. It feels like it was plucked straight from a budget model 10 years ago - cheap materials, dated design, and a general air of neglect. The exterior styling may have aged well, but that's about it. This truck has been put in the market just to be there, without any real intention of standing out from the crowd.

The Maverick, Ford's newer compact pickup, is starting to look like a better option for many buyers. Not only does it offer a more modern interior, but it's also cheaper than the Ranger. The Bronco, on the other hand, is just the ultimate package - if you want a real off-road truck with all the bells and whistles, that's where you need to look. And even the F-150, Ford's flagship pickup, seems to have left the Ranger in its dust.

So, what does this mean for potential buyers? If you like the exterior styling of the Ranger, or the Tremor package, you might be okay with it. However, if you're looking for a more refined driving experience, and don't mind paying a bit extra, you may want to look elsewhere. The competition in the mid-size pickup segment is tough, and there are better options out there.

Overall, I'd say that the Ford Ranger is a truck with a lot of potential, but not enough polish to make it truly great. With its rough ride, noisy tires, and dated interior, it's a bit of a compromise. But if you're looking for a budget-friendly option with decent off-road capabilities, it might be worth considering. Just don't expect too much - the Ranger is a truck that's almost, but not quite, ready to shine.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthe ford ranger we did a video on this circa 2019 when it was released in the united states and needless to say we weren't the biggest fans however i'm going to take a more objective approach with this video because things have been slightly updated we're going to cover the exterior interior and of course the technical details so let's get started with that the basics three trims xl poverty spec starts around 25 grand you get the xlt which pushes 30 and then you get the lariat which is the upper trim level the big thing for this model here they've added the tremor package and you might wonder what the hell is that you know it's not something that gives you the shakes or will create an earthquake it's designed to bridge the gap between the ranger raptor which we don't get here and the fx off-road package it's somewhere in the middle and it adds forty three hundred dollars to the price so you can only get that on the xlt which is this and the lariat the way this is configured with the infotainment the tremor pack it's 42 000. we'll get into all the technical details of that on the shop overall the exterior looks slightly different and it helps to have a giant tremor logo on the back and when you get over the exterior it definitely looks like one of the better trucks it's more mainstream without looking over styled or understyled now the big thing is when you get into the interior and this is where i lost my mind with the last truck i'll start with the pros the basics are here it really is a low contrast matte interior space with no gimmicky plastics nothing flashy nothing overly shiny it is just functional which means you can have a obliterate this thing with mud diarrhea or you know if you're hauling stuff you're not going to tear it up and it's not going to look horribly dirty all the time so that's good the seats are very comfortable the tremor package gets this fabric center towards the back and a tremor logo but they do have a lot of give to them and a lot of padding there is minimal bolstering however the other thing that they add here is the auxiliary switches on the upper dashboard you can toggle those you can do led light bars to blind other people on the road you can add bull horns whatever you're gonna put on here at least it's here and it's easily accessible with physical switches now let's get into the down and dirty this looks horribly cheap uh from the way that the key feels the way that it goes into the door it feels extraordinarily old at least two generations old the physical buttons in here which is everything's physical thank god but they feel cheap like they put no effort into it it they're super small hard to touch when you're on the go but they have made two improvements to the things that i complained about the most with the last truck if you opt for the infotainment package and not the basic screen the next generation infotainment is way faster it no longer lags to death it no longer freezes up where it's totally unusable and they've also made it much more easy to navigate apple carplay android auto work pretty well in here with medical minimal lag or issues and because of the infotainment they've also updated the gauge cluster which was a disaster in the last truck this is more traditional two analog gauges and a center screen that works perfectly well for all your multi-function information now we don't have the bang olufsen audio system in here this is the base audio if you saw a review you'll know the bno is one of the worst we tested and this bass audio sounds almost identical so the good thing is you can get a better sound stage out of it by turning off the speed compensated volume and changing the drive or the focus of the speakers to the driver and then you get a better sound stage better imaging it it doesn't sound great at least it's tolerable everything else has a good physical presence the shifter the terrain modes all the storage is excellent you have a manual parking brake the cup holders are big and there's plenty of storage in the center area and of course the door space is good for a whole bunch of stuff the back seats are comfortable assuming you have the front seats a little bit farther forward and the bed is what you expect at least this truck has some coating on the bed so you won't tear it up however the lift gate is not soft open and soft closed so you have to be a little bit more careful with that but overall this is an extraordinarily old platform and truck it feels and looks that way everywhere on the interior space but we're going to talk more about that during the drive in the shop segment so let's do it right now mark we're underneath the danger ranger this is the ford ranger with the tremor package the version we have is the xlt not the lariat so the way the trimmer package works it's the most off-road capable package available for the ford ranger and it can either be had on the lariat or the less expensive xlt and it gives you some off-road goodies mark so walk me through that so the trummer package does truly give you more off-road capability so for one you get a better approach departure and breakover angle it improves it by roughly two degrees all the way around the suspension travel improves in the front by 6.5 inches and in the back it's eight and a half so you're getting the wheel travel you're getting the bigger tires at 34 inches and you're getting the skid plates you're getting a whole bunch of real off-road things that people want out of a product like this you're just not getting the power it's standard now with the 2.3 liter the ecoboost engine and it does make a significant amount of horsepower made it to a 10-speed automatic which we're going to go over all that and the torque is the big thing it produces about 310 foot-pounds of torque and because it's a turbocharged application versus some of the naturally aspirated variants found in the tacoma and the i believe the uh the frontier you get torque earlier which in a truck is theoretically a good thing the one thing to bring up though is much like the tacoma and the colorado this is actually a really old product underneath this ranger was introduced in like 2019 in the united states but this is built on the t6 architecture so it's really a very old platform found in places like australia it's a global truck platform body on frame that they've also had to improve it's not just a carryover they've had to make some changes for the well the american market specifically and the increase of payload and i will say this frame it is all steel and basically everything underneath the steel but it is fully boxed the next thing that they've done here is maintained the towing capacity of 7 500 pounds so they have they haven't altered that and they have added the addition of fox shocks so the fox shocks in the front are aluminum body the back are steel however there is a piggyback reservoir and these are not like high-end fox shocks that you're going to find on the real wrap like the raptor they are it's just giving you a little bit extra oil oiling capacity and preventing anti-foaming and all the the heat soaking that you're getting by giving you those piggyback reservoir piggyback canisters on there in the back so again these are all incremental changes they made some tuning differences to spring rates and all that as well and it's still double arm in the front and a liver axle in the rear so it's a real truck unlike something like a ridgeline you get an electronic locking rear differential as well so that that also gives them the ability to add the terrain modes that you can choose like mud sand a lot basically what every manufacturer is now trying to advertise but this is not a unibody design so you are getting the truckishness there you're getting the off-road capability and it's just really up to the buyer if they want to spring for the type of money that this is going to require to get in to get this and let's talk about that on the drive all right we're back in the ranger jack 2.3 we got lots of horsepower here sure subtle ain't a fake engine noise coming from that turbocharged 4 popper lots of torque though mark lots of torque no it's that i i'm joking around but really that this is completely adequate it's got enough torque it feels smooth when you're going flat out and it is colder so you know turbocharged engines and tuning like that but we're gonna get right into it so there's been some minor adjustments here in terms of drivability and it's largely because of the suspension package and while personally i think it's a little rough over certain pavement types you get a lot of like shunt a lot of like harsh weird frequency impacts from it this is the trade-offs of having this type of suspension you have the lift you have the increased ride height and the better damping or wheel travel it is floatier than the the original or base rangers we've driven though as well oh yeah yeah definitely but it's an off-road truck and this is to be fair i can't believe i'm going to be defending him everything in this segment the mid-sized truck in the united states everything's old i can't believe nissan has the most modern and most recently refreshed mid-sized truck with a frontier but the tacoma is ancient the colorado's ancient and this thing is even though it's new for 2019 it's really an old truck as well so i can't really fault ford there and this motor is far more potent at least around town it may not be as reliable as the v6 that's found in the tacoma which is going away anyways this is pretty effective it is it is effective for the class and i think if you're a ford person you want this mid-sized truck thing it's it's kind of a no-brainer really but the problem is now ford has made this a lot more irrelevant than it was before when he first first talked about this we didn't have the bronco we didn't have the maverick so at this price point and this interior space and some of it's just a lack of refinement for its age i would personally rather be in a bronco but if you need if you're going off-road yes if you're going off-road or you know you could save a lot of money going to the maverick if you don't need the off-road capability the towing or the towing or if you need really true truckness you get an f-150 so this is kind of in this weird limbo the last thing i'm going to talk about before we get into the final thoughts jack is because a lot of this is so much carryover i don't want to beat a dead horse now i want to just kind of talk about the transmission and the drivetrain here i complained about it before but really the big thing here is the way that this is tuned and you can feel it right now this is a perfect example there is so much drivetrain fighting it almost feels like a wheel is out of balance it does because what it's doing is it's holding too high of a gear at a too low of an rpm so if you get caught in this 35 mile an hour zone you'll see the tackles be spinning at like 1200 rpm and you'll be stuck in eighth or like usually eighth gear and it's too high of a gear and it always gets in this mode where the car is not moving and all you do is hear this chugging if you've ever driven a car with a bent wheel that's almost what it feels like it's i'm not sure if it's the camera's picking up all that well but there's like this almost like it's a hum right it's a hum it's a vibration it's a like a frequency of a frequency a low frequency that's transmitting through the entire truck and you'll notice it there when it's holding too high of a gear but you'll also notice that when you're going like 45 where you start to feel almost like a growl or a vibration coming from the middle part of the car in the drive shaft or the rear differential they don't have this drivetrain balanced out and when you add the start stop and you feel it again here when you add the start stop to it it's killing the engine creating a lot of vibration it doesn't spin up right away and then you get the vibration from the start stop system when you're going it's just a very frustrating poorly tuned setup that that's one of the biggest deal breakers here for me if you're going flat out you don't feel it as much and if you're going at higher speeds you don't feel it that much but for me when i drove it i had to keep it in sport because that was the only way i could keep the transmission at a speed that didn't create this vibration and to be fair this is a truck but if you compare it to other trucks they don't have this problem last thing i will say is all of this is here for fuel economy it's here to improve that fuel economy number for that fleet average and when you look down my average is 19.7 and you can make the argument well it's a truck it's still not good you have all these sacrifices here just to get you that fuel economy number that isn't even that great so with that said jack let's head into the final bonus final thoughts on the ford ranger if you can get the tremor package for around four thousand dollars you get a lot for your money here in the mid-size segment you get skid plates you get decent off-road suspension you get great ride height and ground clearance and it doesn't sacrifice your towing capability it is extraordinarily good off-road and of course on road there are some compromises it rides a little bit rough and it's a bit noisier with the tires but it's not a total deal breaker believe me if you're coming from a full-size offering or more off-road vehicle this is going to feel almost like like an suv so that's pretty much where the pros end aside from the exterior styling which is definitely aged quite well the interior feels cheap it's extraordinarily dated and i think most people are going to look at the price tag when you're paying over 40 and you're going to expect a lot more and the fact that ford has made this even more relevant with the maverick which is way cheaper it has a better interior and the bronco is just the ultimate package and even the f-150 is just it's the truck this is lost somewhere in the middle and i think it's lost because they just put it in the market just to put it here it's the older platform i'm not gonna even beat a dead horse with that the biggest deal breaker continues to be the drivetrain i think they've over done it with the fuel conserving measures and it makes it for a very choppy rough just hesitating like ride and the drivetrain smoothness is not there namely to any of the competitors that it's going against so where does that leave you well if you like the exterior you like the tremor pack you might be okay with it you might be okay with just how basic the interior is they have improved a few things but you know i'm gonna leave it at that competition's tough and uh you're gonna have to spend a lot of money to get there so make a good decision thanks for watching i'll see you next time\n"