As the picture at this paragraph’s right must have already anticipated, unfortunately your answer is still a “not yet”. That all-new SUV which has started to be photographed on road tests will take longer to arrive, but since it uses the current Ranger’s platform it isn’t difficult to expect it’ll extend the sharing to its global offering, too. While nothing of that is confirmed, though, Ford keeps improving the regional SUVs which have been defending the automaker in countries where it can’t rely on names such as Explorer or Expedition.
Pick-up trucks and SUVs describe a construction “partnership” very similar to what is used to happen between sedans and station wagons, in the car industry. It isn’t recommended to build the four of them on the same platform because of each group’s particular specifications, but it’s very frequent to see a new sedan being joined by its SW sibling and a pick-up its SUV variation both few months after the first release, because it’s easy to project these pairs together from the beginning. That’s exactly what used to happen specially in North America, due to that market’s strong preferences for these kinds of vehicles: Dodge Dakota and Durango, Ford Ranger and Explorer and Toyota Hilux and 4Runner’s first generations were created like that, to give some examples. These stories only had to follow different paths from the last decade, mostly because the market’s changing tastes started to demand deeper project differences. The pick-ups needed to keep representing the resistant, work-dedicated vehicles while the SUVs became more urban than ever, keeping some of that off-road toughness while improving on luxury and styling to defend itselves from the crossovers. The automakers, therefore, started to project all the SUVs’ and all the pick-ups’ levels separately, rather than several pairs of one-and-one.
Unfortunately, that strategy resulted on some losses to other markets, specially the emergent ones. Since most of them doesn’t go further than the midsize off-road level because there aren’t too many customers on more expensive levels, each time it turns harder for other countries to import or produce the newer generations of those SUVs and pick-ups with competitive prices. Everest and Endeavour, just like the Australian non-related Territory, emerged as those ones’ solution to that problem. This article’s SUV is the regional variation of Ranger’s previous phase, which was released in 2003 and now receives the third facelift on the original generation – Explorer has stopped to share Ranger’s platform since 2002, and in nowadays competes among the full-size SUVs. South-African Ford has been trying to disguise this car’s 1990s construction applying the automaker’s latest design languages specially to the front fascia, which this time resembles the Indian Figo: the front bumper includes the secondary grille in Ford’s new typical shape, although keeping the upper portion untouched. There are new fog lamps and side mirrors and the new Copper Red color for the outside. The interior’s biggest update was dropping the two-tone caramel coating in favor of all black, besides of adding cruise control and multimedia sound system. This car uses the Duratorq 3.0 TDCi engine with the options of all-wheel-drive and five-speed automatic transmission.
