The Ford Ranger Super Duty could be the most Australian ute produced since new-car production ended locally.
Born from an idea by Ford Australia CEO Andrew Birkic in 2018 – when Mr Birkic was global product marketing lead for the Ranger and Everest – and a senior Ford Truck manager at the time, the Ranger Super Duty has been designed, engineered, and tested by the Ford Australia team right from inception, all the way up to production.
Despite wearing the same badge and sharing interiors and exteriors with the standard Ranger, the Super Duty is almost an entirely new vehicle – specifically created to address the wants and needs of fleet buyers.
Mr Birkic said the “spark of an idea” came from a conversation with a key customer, who told them there wasn’t a vehicle on the market that met all of his needs.
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“[The Ford Ranger Super Duty] is a manifestation of that, and it really is a wonderful story of innovation and imagination, you know, building off an incredible platform of Ranger,” Mr Birkic explained during a roundtable discussion.
Ford’s engineering team says it worked closely with representatives from the mining, forestry, fire management, and agriculture industries throughout the development of the Ranger Super Duty, continually checking in and finding ways to incorporate their feedback.
“We went out and listened to people, and just listened and listened and listened – until you couldn’t listen anymore,” Justin Capicchiano, chief program engineer for the Ranger Super Duty, Ford Racing and Special Vehicle Engineering, told media at the launch.
That feedback boiled down to six core requirements: payload and towing, safety, the integration into a product ecosystem, capability, simplicity, and efficiency.
With a gross vehicle mass (GVM) of 4500kg and a gross combined mass (GCM) of 8000kg, Ford created the Super Duty by redesigning the chassis with thicker reinforced steel, re-engineering the suspension, upgrading the steering, brakes, and drivetrain, and borrowing the eight-stud wheel hubs from the US-market F-250 Super Duty.
Along with a beefier transfer case, Ford retuned the transmission, upgraded the engine with better cooling, added a 130-litre fuel tank, and then fitted 4mm-thick steel underbody armour.
According to Ford engineers, the armour plate for the fuel tank can withstand the car’s entire weight, should the vehicle find itself see-sawing on a rock while off-roading.
The Ranger Super Duty has also borrowed other innovations from Ford’s F-Series, adding integrated weight scales to help avoid overloading.
Mr Birkic specifically called out the Toyota LandCruiser 70 Series as a direct competitor, while making the occasional off-the-cuff comment about vehicles not even coming with cup holders – a thinly veiled remark about the LandCruiser.
But while Toyota has dominated the segment for arguably decades – with limited competition from the Nissan Patrol ute and Mercedes-Benz G-Class Professional, both now axed – Ford clearly has its crosshairs on the 70 Series, while also going after cab-over trucks like the Isuzu N-Series.
Though rivals like the Toyota LandCruiser 70 Series ute and the Isuzu N-Series truck were seldom mentioned by name, it’s clear Ford Australia believes there is opportunity in the heavy-duty, car-licence ute segment – which has arguably been neglected by most automakers.