Ford Bronco no certainty for Australia

The Blue Oval’s plan to revive the born-again Ford Bronco as a global model doesn’t guarantee its arrival in Australian showrooms.

The newly-appointed boss of Ford Australia, Kay Hart, has told motoring.com.au the Bronco’s arrival Down Under is far from a fait accompli.

The reasoning? The humble Ford Ranger utility, Ford’s best-selling model in Australia.

“I don’t know. Ranger has been such a great player in the market here and has made a strong position for itself,” Hart argued when we asked her of the 2020 Ford Bronco’s chances of being sold here.

“We’ll always look at new models and what they offer, but right now Ranger is doing such a good job and is really a hit in the market in Australia with customers.

“Ranger really fills that space for us in Australia. I think it was our ability to take that to the next level, our strengths in trucks and our strengths in the Ford Performance brand that have been perfect for Ranger,” she continued, referencing the new Ford Ranger Raptor.

Ford has already declared the Bronco a global model, slating 2020 as its introduction in the US.

Hart implied this week that she was unfamiliar with the global rollout, and distanced the local distributor from any current plans for Bronco.

This is despite motoring.com.au’s understanding that Ford engineers in Australia have had a role in developing prototypes of the Bronco, which is based on the same Australian-designed T6 ladder frame as the Ranger and Everest SUV.

“There is no timeline for Australia whatsoever,” said Hart, who confirmed the upcoming five-seat Endura SUV — due in December as a belated replacement for the homegrown Ford Territory that was retired in 2016 — would complete Ford Australia’s SUV line-up for the time being.

“For now, that’s our full SUV line-up, which is great,” she said.

Ford sold several generations of Bronco between the 1960s and mid-1990s, and even assembled a version in Australia with 4.1-litre straight-six and 5.8-litre V8 engines between 1981 and 1987.

At the 2017 Detroit motor show it announced the Bronco nameplate would return for the 2020 model year, when it will fill the space vacated by the Ford Explorer before it migrated from a rugged ladder chassis to a monocoque platform shared with the Mondeo in 2011.

The new Ford Bronco will be built alongside the Ranger at its original plant in Wayne, Michigan, from where current Focus and C-Max production will shift to China.

Some quarters have dismissed the new-generation Bronco as merely a rebadged version of the Everest, but Ford’s former chief technical officer Raj Nair has said otherwise.

“No, it’s a separate vehicle,” he told Autoline Detroit when Ford announced the Bronco’s return.

“It will be an incremental vehicle from the Everest. The Everest kind of serves a lot of off-road capability; maybe the space of the Explorer serves here in the US, but with a body-on-frame construction with a lot more off-road capability for the rest of the world.

“This Bronco is completely unique from that Everest. It is body-on-frame and so again, focusing on that off-road capability.”

Since then Ford has announced it will introduce a new ‘baby Bronco’ go-anywhere small SUV – one of four additional SUV and pick-up models to be launched globally by 2020.

Rendering courtesy of Bronco6G