It would have been neat if I had introduced myself first, but hopefully after reading this story you can imagine that I don’t do that after all. I have a job, kids, a mortgage – so responsibilities. Let me just say that I work at Ford, and I attended a rather out of hand presentation of the new Ford Ranger. Top car. A really nice product, the kind of car where you don’t feel like that employee of Aldi Action who has to promote something that you know will fall apart after a day. No, really something to be proud of. I mean: 40 percent market share in Europe, then you can be proud, right?
I know: the Netherlands is not a country for these kinds of cars, at least not for the general public. How different it is in America, where every half-sole drives a pick-up, just because you can. But I had to be born in the Netherlands if necessary. Still, we shouldn’t grumble. There are plenty of people who really benefit from such a car without having to immediately mount a revolving machine gun or an anti-tank system on it: contractors, forest rangers, rescue teams, people who like to transport their horses standing in the bed, you name it.
Always commercially – privately, those bitches are unaffordable thanks to our car-loving tax climate. But we even offer the Raptor in a gray license plate version: divider behind the front seats, darken the rear windows and your affordable dentures are ready. And otherwise there are always the more rudimentary Stormtrak, Wolftrak and MS-RT versions. Ladder chassis, real workhorses.
The Ford Ranger Raptor Special Edition is a swing-out model
Anyway, back to where I started. The Ranger will be replaced next year, but there are now Special Editions, which in all honesty don’t amount to much: some mild exteriors, red stitching in the interior, you know it. The presentation took place in France – we had actually planned something earlier, in a place where a blind and rabid horse couldn’t do any damage yet, but that couldn’t go through because of some virus.
Now we had to link up with the French, which in itself didn’t seem like a problem to us – you know them, French: modest, friendly, speak their languages: what could possibly go wrong? Well, that was not counting our guests. I’ve known them for some time, that Dutch journalist stuff: give them one finger and you’ll lose your arm. If you put “scum of the ledge” and “gajes of the street” together, you probably end up with them. Apparently French journalists are different, because the local organization made a small mistake.
The place wasn’t the problem
The location was beautiful: an 18th-century chateau in the south, where the foie gras was in your hotel tube of toothpaste: great. The home base for the riding sessions was a wild west amusement park, founded and run by a (Dutch) descendant of the man who had once started Ponypark Slagharen. You would think that should put our journalists mildly lenient.
The fault turned out to be the presence of a lot of woods and some kind of quad/motocross track in the vicinity. Really, as if they could smell it: right there all together. It had rained quite a bit, so it was one big mud puddle. With, to make matters worse, a kind of excavation in the middle, where the mob immediately en masse on collapsed into the Ford Ranger Raptor Special Edition. From an elevation straight down, up an almost impossibly slippery slope, bizarre curves along meanly protruding rocks, and hop, down another steep slope, into a deep mud puddle. And just laugh.
Thank goodness they just had the presence of mind to engage the low range, after which the fluid interaction with the standard ten-speed automatic and the rather effective driving modes do much of the rest. The small part that the driver still has to do himself is, of course, thoroughly screwed up by the gentlemen: bottoms scrape the ground, noses touch the bottom: it almost physically hurt to watch it.
For the Ford Ranger Raptor Special Edition it shouldn’t be a problem
It makes a difference that the Ranger is built for this sort of thing. With 213 hp from a biturbo 2.0-litre diesel engine, which also produces 500 Nm of pulling power, you have to be a very handsome journalist to drive this thing. In addition, it is 150 millimeters larger in track width and has 51 millimeters more ground clearance than, for example, the XLT, making it almost unbeatable in the terrain. Which of course does not mean that the gentlemen did not try their best. The disappointment kind of dripped from their faces.
Then they tried with all their might to plow the surrounding terrain to smithereens. It’s quite an environment to me – purely unpaved, rough and rocky, and therefore ideally suited to throw in the so-called Baja fashion, which the gentlemen readily did. In this driving mode, all systems are put on edge to best respond to this type of terrain. ESP and traction control less active, allowing for a bit of sliding, response to accelerator pedal more toxic, allowing more adequate intervention if the former. My guests are busy with it – because of the mud and dust clouds that have been thrown up I can no longer see exactly what they are up to and maybe that’s for the better.
Of course there had to be jumped
The icing on the cake – their cake – revealed itself when the gentlemen came across a knoll. The first of the pack of cavemen, of course, went over it a little too hard and came off the ground with four wheels. He couldn’t have done that better. It turned out to be an invitation, no: a challenge to do that harder, higher and further. The testosterone battle erupted in full force, with everyone agreeing at most that a speed of 60 km/h was the absolute minimum to be able to fly a nice distance.
One joker was even so witty Learning to Fly of Foo Fighters at full blast by bouncing the bluetooth audio as he dashed down the knoll at 70kph. Imagine it’s your car: the roar of the engine, the slam of impact on the hill, the seemingly endless flight and then the sickening slam of the landing, the body bouncing in and back for what appears to be several feet, and the bottom that in the meantime seems to touch the ground. I still wake up sweating at night.
It is incomprehensible and inexplicable to me that all the cars survived the event. Whistling. With two fingers in the nose. It can only mean one thing: if even this ragtag mess can’t break it, the Ranger is indestructible. It’s not that they haven’t tried. One thing I must give them: I now know that besides cockroaches there is one more species that will survive a nuclear war. The Ford Ranger Raptor Special Edition. But is that such a comforting thought?’
Specifications Ford Ranger Raptor Special Edition (2022)
engine
1,996 cc
four-cylinder biturbo
213 hp @ 3,750 rpm
500 Nm @ 1,750 rpm
Drive
four wheels
10v vending machine
Performance
0-100 km/h in 10.5 s
top 170 km/h
Consumption (average)
10.6 l/100 km
278 g/km CO2, F label
Dimensions
5,363 x 2,028 x 1,873mm (LxWxH)
3,220mm (wheelbase)
2,510 kg
80 l (diesel)
luggage space n/a
Prices
€ 48,700 (NL)
€50,150 (B)
#Motoring #journalists #scum #ledge #luckily #Ford #Ranger #Raptor #handle