There’s a good amount of buzz surrounding Ford’s upcoming SUV/4x4, a replacement for the much adored Bronco that stopped being produced in 1996 after a 30 year run. The most recent development was the reveal that it would have a number of key components in common with the Everest.
While that may be result in a dissonance between what some of us might expect from a Bronco, such as a shorter wheelbase and more compact two-door body packaged around a no-nonsense approach to on- and off-road motoring (like the renderings by Bronco6G), the Ranger/Everest tie-in won’t go much further than chassis sharing.
This was confirmed during a conversation between Autoline Detroit and Ford’s chief technical officer Raj Nair at the ongoing North American International Auto Show in Motor City, Michigan.
“It will fundamentally be the same Ranger we have globally with some changes for U.S. laws, obviously, and also some aspects that U.S. customers are looking for, so slightly modified for the U.S. customer,”
“This new Bronco will be based off the Ranger platform and so it’s going to be a similarly sized vehicle to what you see in the Ranger. Now, for our American customers who have never seen that global Ranger, it’s a bit bigger than the Ranger we used to have here in the U.S., so I would say it’s kind of in-between in what you saw with that really big Bronco, and then the smaller Bronco,” Nair said.
John McElroy of Autoline Detroit pressed further, asking whether the Bronco would be the North American version of the Everest, to which the Ford CTO responded that it will be “…completely unique from the Everest. It is body-on-frame and so again, focusing on that off-road capability.”
This does seem to affirm that the main similarity between the Everest and Bronco are that both are SUVs based upon the Australian-developed Ranger.
For more on Ford vehicles, including pricing and specifications, check out our Showroom.
