More info on battery plan for NZ’s favourite truck set to reveal soon, top engineer suggests.

OUT of the 180 countries down to get the new Ford Ranger, New Zealand is right at the top in expressing desire for a version with some degree of electric drive. 

Ford’s T6 chief platform engineer Ian Foston (above), based in Melbourne, says the product lifecycle for Ranger means that some form of electrification is a given and the brand will be relating more about this soon.

 “We’ve already said we are electrifying, we just haven’t yet been specific about what or when. We’re working on it at the moment and it sometime I can no doubt chat to you about in the months to come.”

The message from Kiwis has come through clearly; we’re anxious for an electric, preferably all-wheel-drive ute and the sooner a battery-included Ranger is available, the better.

“I’d say feedback from the New Zealand market is pretty clear. Your Government is pushing hard to make a difference in having cleaner vehicles.

“In the southern hemisphere, I’d probably say New Zealand is one of the more progressive kind of nations in wanting to go Green, which is great. In Europe, China and North America there is also clearly a desire.”

 At yesterday’s media event for the new model, in Hawke’s Bay, the 50-year-old Briton who shifted to Ford after starting his career at Jaguar Land Rover, indicated this Ranger’s platform life cycle was likely to be 10 to 12 years and that “clearly electrification is something we have to consider.

“It’s safe to say that the platform is very modular and flexible … being a body on frame vehicle there is plenty of space for us to consider many locations for various bits and pieces.”

Foston has previously said the vehicle has “a bandwidth of electrification hardware” that enables Ford to go anywhere from a 24-volt mild hybrid all the way through to a fully-electric version.

Ford has made clear for some time it wants its traydecks to go electric. Obviously, in America, there’s already the large-sized F-150 Lightning.

The Lightning (and Thunder) citations have been registered by the brand. In 2021, Hau Thai-Tang, Ford's Chief Product Platform and Operations Officer, confirmed that the dedicated battery-electric vehicle platform with a rear-drive/all-wheel-drive platform would spawn a “mid-size electric pick-up truck.”

Adding relevance is a recent report quoting high-ups from Volkswagen, which partnered with the Blue Oval in developing the T6.2 project and will use the Ranger as the basis for the new-generation Amarok, here in 2023.

 VW has also confirmed the body-on-frame chassis can accept an electric drivetrain and battery pack.

However, there is suggestion the brands’ projects might take different directions – the VW being a wholly battery-committed vehicle. Lars Krause, the Volkswagen Commercial Vehicle with responsibility for marketing told a media briefing his make is “looking at a pure-electric version.”

Whether going full BEV is Ford’s intention also is anyone’s guess. There has been past talk Ranger might initially be tailored as a plug-in hybrid and then go fully electric.

Retaining a fossil fuel-fed engine working with an electric motor would leave it on par with the new Mitsubishi Triton, coming out next year and also expected to go PHEV in 2024, the same year cited as a possible outing for the Ford.

Krause has expressed confidence the chassis could house a BEV drivetrain and battery pack. A recent interview picked by Wheels magazine quoted him as saying: “Yes, we think it is possible. Obviously, we’d need to modify certain elements. But, yes, we are seriously considering an electric variant.” 

 As Foston says, how Ford has engineered Ranger allows latitude for anything. The engine bay allows plenty of space for any sort of ancillaries or motors to be fitted, the front and rear tracks are pushed out by 50 millimetres each side with outboard dampers which Ford has tacitly suggested allows for expansion of the centrelines – and, on top of that the cavity in which the production fuel tank fits is massively oversized for that 80-litre unit.

Says Foston: “Ford have got all of the different hybrid and full electric technologies and it would be wrong of me to say that we haven’t looked at everything.”

It’s more than just determining technology compatibility. “We are also of course looking at what our customers might want. We are now executing on what we think is the right strategy – but I cannot say what that is.”

At the moment, the push is wholly with fossil-fuelled powerplants, diesel in two versions of a 2.0-litre four-cylinder – one single turbo, the other with two – plus a single turbo 3.0-litre V6.

Raptor, coming in September/October, is also taking a V6, but in a twin turbo form, controversial because in addition to being the most powerful engine ever for Ranger, it is also the thirstiest and has the highest CO2.

 In the age of legislation designed to hobble ute addiction, some might wonder if going six-cylinder is imprudent. Every Ranger (though, to be fair, every diesel ute) copes a Clean Car penalty, but the line’s average CO2 has risen through the capacity upreach. The biggest engine Ranger has previously had was the five-cylinder 3.2-litre.

Yet Ford believes it is on safe ground. It says when Ranger customers were surveyed during T6.2’s seven-year development, top of the list of desires was a bigger engine.

 Kiwi pre-orders reflect this; the V6s account for at least half of the sales sign-ups so far, local boss Simon Rutherford said yesterday.

The order list keeps growing, too – at the media day, Rutherford said he has 5055 orders. A week ago, there were 3500. 

Most are going diesel and the factory is stretched - anyone ordering a Wildtrak with that powerplant now and won’t see it before February – but there are also 691 orders for the Raptor.

The ongoing desire for Ranger also suggests that Kiwis aren’t keen to give up on the truck whose outgoing format was so favoured it had, within two years of arrival in 2011, bumped the Toyota Hilux out of a decades’ long dominance of one-tonne ute sector and has several times - the most recent being last year -  being the country’s most popular vehicle overall.

 Though Rutherford anticipates its passenger model presence being lifted by a broadened electrified (hybrid/plug-in hybrid Escape, Puma, Focus) and full electric (Mustang Mach-E) choices in 2023, it still reckons Ranger will continue as the top dog product, achieving 60 percent of its volume next year and potentially in 2024, a period when distributors will also be paying CO2 penalities of greater significance than buyers have had to foot since April 1. 

Going back to VW; being V6 and having fulltime all-wheel-drive were core sales attractions of the current Amarok. Was the inclusion of those elements into the new Ford a requirement to achieve Germany’s involvement in the T6.2 programme?

Apparently not. Foston says the six-cylinder drivesets, sourced from Ford US, were sorted to a year before VW even broached the concept of a dual development.

“They were just rapt. They were chuffed to bits. We basically showed them everything we were doing and they just said ‘great, you’re doing everything we want’.”

Ford and VW are now collaborating on other projects – one being Ford’s use of the MEB passenger car electric platform that will underpin Audis, VWs, Skodas and Cupras - another being electric electric commercial vans, starting with Transit. The ‘Rangerok’ tie-up happened before those plans were inked.

“They wanted to focus on commercial vehicles first, and other things were to follow. On the commercial side we were the first programme. We’ve been the trailblazers in many ways, we have set up a lot of the programmes the others are following, we wrote the rules of engagement.”