What if an automobile manufacturer could develop a new product, bring it to market, never substantially update the product, and continue to sell that product at a similar pace year after year? That would be impressive. But Ford could not manage to execute that four-pronged action with the Ranger.
Yes, Ford originally developed a Ranger, brought the Ranger to the North American market, and didn’t bother to truly update the Ranger. The consistent sales pace aspect? Nope, didn’t happen.
U.S. Ranger sales declined in 11 consecutive years at the end of its tenure, from 2000 to 2010. The 28-percent year-over-year increase to 70,832 units in 2011 occurred as Ford cleared out the final Rangers at ridiculously low prices and buyers of small trucks who wanted a genuinely small truck picked up the Rangers that remained.
Yet while Ranger numbers declined sharply over the truck’s final decade, falling 69 percent between 2002 and its final full year in 2011, the numbers were never that low. True, Ranger volume was strengthened by prices that made the Ranger affordable to buyers of subcompact cars, and the numbers were low in comparison with popular full-size trucks.
If, in 2014, Ford sold 113,000 Rangers, the average annual volume achieved over its final decade, the little Ford pickup would have been America’s 43rd-best-selling vehicle. That would have placed the Ranger ahead of many common vehicles: Edge, Pilot, Santa Fe, RX, Terrain, Mazda 3.
With an all-new Ranger, a truck to be produced at Ford Motor Company’s factory in Wayne, Michigan, would there be potential for Ford return to the days of selling more than 300,000 non-full-size trucks in America?
200,000?
100,000?
In addition to the Ranger, could Ford sell a handful of Broncos, helping to spread the cost of investment across multiple sectors while attempting to loosen the Jeep Wrangler’s off-road stranglehold in ways the Toyota FJ Cruiser could not?
Here are four sets of facts to consider in order for you to develop an answer regarding the Ranger’s future.
First, the Ranger was once the segment’s top-selling model. Not only that, the Ranger was the best seller by a wide margin, and rather recently. In 2003, the Ranger was America’s fourth-best-selling truck line with nearly 210,000 sales, 55,000 units ahead of the second-ranked Toyota Tacoma, 32,498 sales ahead of GM’s small truck phalanx. By 2004, the Ranger’s lead over the Tacoma decreased to only 3,390 units and the Ranger slipped into fifth place overall among trucks. The Tacoma hasn’t fallen from the top spot since earning top honours in 2005.
Surely the Ranger’s status as a former dominant player in the small truck arena could engender plenty of positive attention.
Second, if we’re to consider GM’s latest endeavor into the small/midsize truck segment as a history lesson, we could conclude that additional candidates serve to improve the category’s stature. Rather than eating into the share of the pie previously eaten only by the Toyota Tacoma, Nissan Frontier, and Honda Ridgeline, the latest Chevrolet Colorado and GMC Canyon increased the size of the pie. Through the first eight months of 2015, even with the Ridgeline on hiatus and the Frontier’s recent stumbles, midsize truck sales are up 49 percent compared with the same period one year ago. Category-wide sales are up by 79,296 units with the Colorado and Canyon contributing 76,000 extra sales and the Tacoma surging to the tune of 19,328 additional units.
Perhaps Ford could follow General Motors’ lead by expanding the scope of the segment.
Third, the market is cyclical. At this moment, as U.S. sales of SUVs and crossovers boom, it’s difficult for many observers to see how the trend could ever be reversed. Yet the leading cause of the SUV/CUV rise – automakers re-creating what it is that makes a utility vehicle – came after Americans turned away from utility vehicles. Similarly, full-size truck sales are increasingly healthy as automakers turned sharply toward improved fuel economy and a product mix that favours families and high-end buyers.
American consumers once purchased small/midsize pickups at a furious rate. Couldn’t a product more in keeping with modern demands cause the market to respond favourably in the latter part of this decade, building on the work of the Tacoma, Colorado, Canyon, Frontier and a new Ridgeline?
Finally, however, there is one key detracting perspective. American consumers no longer buy small/midsize pickups at a furious rate, not even during this phase of rapid improvement in 2015. As recently as 2003, 24 percent of the pickup trucks sold in the United States were not of the full-size variety. In 2015, without a Dodge Dakota, Mazda B-Series, Mitsubishi Raider, any forgotten Isuzu competitor, or a Ford Ranger, the same segment accounts for only 15 percent of the trucks sold in America. Americans will purchase and lease approximately 360,000 small/midsize trucks in 2015, half the number sold in 2003.
We would be misleading ourselves if we didn’t trace much of that decline back to the loss of many offerings, including 2003’s top-selling model. Could Ford sell 300,000 Rangers in 2018? No. 200,000? Not likely. But with GM on track to sell more than 100,000 midsize trucks in 2015, it certainly seems likely that Ford could do the same with the Ranger, assuming Ford can get the size and price right. Like GM, Ford may even be able to add the Ranger’s volume without doing any harm to their full-size moneymaker, the F-Series.
Timothy Cain is the founder of GoodCarBadCar.net, which obsesses over the free and frequent publication of U.S. and Canadian auto sales figures. Follow on Twitter @goodcarbadcar and on Facebook.
The post Can Ford Return To The Days Of Selling Hundreds Of Thousands Of Rangers Per Year? appeared first on The Truth About Cars.
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