2026 Ford Ranger Super Duty confirmed

Ford Australia has announced a Ranger Super Duty is nearing the end of its development and will arrive in 2026 as a mega-capable workhorse designed to cater to extreme-duty industries.

It will be the first time the ‘Super Duty’ name has been applied to anything other than an F-truck, and Blue Oval has insisted the 2026 Ford Ranger Super Duty will be much more than a ‘sticker tuning’ exercise or bolt-on special.

Full specifications are being kept under wrap for the time being, however, a few hard numbers have been let slip and look primed to rewrite the mid-sized ute rulebook.

Ford has thus far confirmed a 4500kg braked towing capacity, a 4500kg gross vehicle mass (GVM) and a massive 8000kg gross combination mass.

For reference, a standard Ranger XL double-cab 2.0-litre 4x4 automatic has a maximum towing capacity of 3500kg, a GVM of 3250kg and a GCM of 6350kg.

It’s hard to find anything that comes close to touching those numbers, even in the full-sized ute class populated by the Chevrolet Silverado, Ram 1500, Toyota Tundra and, indeed, Ford’s own F-150.

Those Yank tanks can tow more in their native North America, but in Australia they’re limited to 4500kg to keep them car-license friendly.

Their GCMs are mostly in the 7000-8000kg range with the exception of heavy-duty models like the Silverado HD and Ram 3500 ($160k+ propositions), but payloads are usually substantially lower than what most mid-sized utes can carry.

The Ranger Super Duty, somehow, manages to outgun all those non-HD full-sizers in those three critical metrics, not to mention all of its midsize segment rivals.

Ford’s brief press release announcing the Ranger Super Duty didn’t detail exactly how it managed to muscle-up the Ranger platform to such levels, but it did say the Ranger Super Duty will, like its namesake cousins in the USA, be primarily pitched at fleet customers – particularly those in the farming, utilities, forestry, mining and emergency services sectors, industries Ford consulted throughout the Super Duty’s development.

“Ranger Super Duty blends the smart features and advanced safety of … Ranger with heavy-duty capability and delivers what our buyers told us they needed but couldn’t get anywhere else,” Ford global truck boss Sondra Sutton Phung said.

And as with the Ranger itself, Australia was largely responsible for bringing the Ranger Super Duty from concept to reality.

The bulk of design, engineering and development was conducted in Australia by around 1500 Ford staffers, so while the Super Duty name might be intrinsically connected to America, the Ranger Super Duty should have a profoundly local flavour.

Visually, it should also stand apart from most other Rangers too.

Ford has only released a single shadowy image of the Ranger Super Duty showing it from a front-on angle, but we can immediately see that it will wear wider bodywork than standard, with wider quarter panels and add-on black plastic wheelarches.

What’s more, that bodywork appears to be specific to the Super Duty, with a prominent bevel around the leading edges of the quarter panels and a bonnet that isn’t present on the current Ranger Raptor’s widebody.

With more than a year to go before the Ranger Super Duty rolls into Ford showrooms, we should see and hear about it in more detail throughout 2025.

What’s clear right now, though, is that Ford is headed toward attaining an almost unassailable advantage in the mid-sized ute segment.

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